4 ms·

Why is the us department of energy building telescopes? Did I misunderstand something?

• downrightmike 4y ago
  They need to understand high-energy physics, and most of the places to study them are in the sky.
• defrost 4y ago
  They're involved, and they're building orbital sensors, and they are the OG discovers of really big gamma ray bursts. Why? Well the Departamento de Energía de Estados Unidos (DOE) (as the article refers to them) is interested in "energy" .. and by "energy" they really mean nuclear weapons. It was a Cold War thing. Their interest here is in ground truthing and the elimination of "normal, not a bomb" stuff ... it'd be a bad day if an astro event billions of years in the past triggered a global thermal nuclear war because Bob the nanosecond reflex triggerhappy automaton got confused about a couple of rapidly spinning galactic core black holes eating each out. Or, as the DOE explains: https://www.energy.gov/science/doe-explainscosmic-acceleration-and-dark-energy https://www.energy.gov/science/doe-explainscosmic-accelerati... https://www.energy.gov/science/articles/our-expanding-universe-delving-dark-energy https://www.energy.gov/science/articles/our-expanding-univer... https://www.energy.gov/science/doe-explainsdark-matter https://www.energy.gov/science/doe-explainsdark-matter err, or rather 'explains' but doesn't mention much about the intial rational behind their decades of work with orbiting gamma ray sensors. Nothing to see here.
  • sbierwagen 4y ago
    Yes, the first astronomical gamma ray bursts showed up as events on Vela nuclear explosion detection satellites in the late 60s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_gamma-ray_burst_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_gamma-ray_burst_res...
• prpl 4y ago
  Dark Energy primarily, dark matter to a lesser degree. The other reason is because NSF doesn’t really “run“ things.