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Silence! The Last of the Giant Radio Telescopes Is Listening to the Universe: “
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There’s a geek mecca in them thar hills. And don’t expect your iPhone’s GPS to guide you to it. Hidden in the green hills of West Virginia, in a 13,000-square-mile National Radio Quiet Zone, is the world’s largest fully steerable telescope.
The GBT (Great Big Telescope, Great Big Thing or Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, depending on whom you ask) is the most overbooked telescope in the world. The waiting list to get some time on this baby is long and prestigious. And with good cause: Its sensitivity to radio signals is unparalleled.
The telescope is so sensitive, in fact, that the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) has a van that drives around the surrounding countryside asking people to stop using their wireless speaker systems, electric fences, broadband wireless modems, military radar, etc. — anything that might interfere with the telescope’s readings.
With the growing popularity of radio-array telescopes, the GBT may end up being the last single-dish telescope of its kind built in the world. The difference between an array and a giant single-dish like the GBT is the difference between a zoom and wide-angle lens on your camera. The GBT is extremely good at finding a source in space by searching a wide area, while the radio array is like a telephoto lens that good at looking at the details.
Read on for a tour of this towering instrument of space exploration.
Above: The GBT is 485 feet tall, a nudge taller than the Statue of Liberty and a nudge shorter than the Washington monument. It was put into service in early 2000.
Below: The NRAO’s 140 telescope is just around the corner from the GBT. The 140 was out of service for a number of years, but has been brought back online in conjunction with an MIT project to study turbulent properties of the earth’s ionosphere.
Photos: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
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(Via Wired Science.)
A New Beautiful Bend Oregon Prefab: “
Since we first mentioned Stillwater Dwellings in March, the new company has been extremely busy. Not only have they lined up plans to build green prefabs in Portland (Or.), Santa Barbara (Ca.), and Healdsburg (Ca.), but they’ve recently completed their first prefab home in Bend, Oregon. The company was kind enough to send us a few photos of the inside and outside, and the modern home is just stunning.
It was built using the sd231 floor plan and includes 2,950 square feet of space. Of that space, there’s three bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, a laundry room, and 600 square feet of garage space. Amazingly, the cost to construct it was $175 per square foot, which includes site work (i.e., excavation, foundation, utilities, and driveway) and six modules of transportation.
Stillwater Dwellings built the home in three weeks in the factory, spent a week making sure everything was good, set the home in 5.5 hours on site, and ushered in the homeowners about three weeks later. Now that’s pretty quick! The completed home has some of the following green features:
- Marmoleum flooring in guest bath & laundry room;
- Honed Caesarstone countertops;
- Dual flush toilets and low-consumption plumbing faucets;
- All Energy Star appliances;
- Passive cooling with clerestory windows at the highest point of the room;
- Operable skylights (3 total) in the middle for stack effect cooling;
- Low VOC paints inside & out;
- Hardwood floors finished using a OSMO Hardwax Oil;
- 100% natural wool carpet w/ recycled content pad;
- SFI certified wood windows with low-e film and argon gas;
- High-efficiency heat pump;
- Automated HVAC system pegged to outside and forecast weather;
- Smart, automated lighting systems on dimmers;
- Systems monitored/adjusted via a web-based portal (or iPhone); and
- All native landscaping elements.
Some people assume that a prefab won’t have open or expansive spaces inside, but as you can see below, Stillwater Dwellings doesn’t design or build your average prefab home. This home has 10′ lower level ceilings and up to 13′ clerestory windows on the top floor. And the great room is 16′ wide by 45′ long.
Photo credits: Stillwater Picasa Album and Stillwater Dwellings.
AppleInsider | Inside Apple’s new Mac mini Server: ”
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Saturday, October 24, 2009
Inside Apple’s new Mac mini Server
By Daniel Eran Dilger
Published: 05:00 PM EST
While Appleinsider predicted the arrival of a new dual-drive, optical-free Mac mini, Apple managed keep secret its plans to introduce a new Mac mini server bundle up to its relatively subtle launch this week. Now the company faces the task of publicizing its availability as it works to enter a market it hasn’t excelled at in the past.
The new Mac mini server offering isn’t just optimized to run Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server, but now actually comes bundled with Apple’s server operating system software. Previously, home and small business users who wanted to try Snow Leopard Server needed to shell out $500 for the retail box version or opt for an Xse”
(Via Appleinsider .)
Cluster tucked at the far reaches of the Universe: “
A cluster of galaxies recently observed by three different telescopes now holds the record for the most distant ever seen: 10.2 billion light years, a solid billion light years farther away than the previous record holder!
[Click to embiggen.]
The cluster, called JKCS041 — evidently all the cool names have already been taken — was discovered in 2006 and subsequently observed by Chandra. The image above also includes observations by the Very Large Telescope in Chile, and the Digitized Sky Survey. In this image, the blue glow is from X-ray-emitting hot gas between galaxies, and the white galaxies are from the optical and infrared observations.
The image doesn’t look like much, but it’s scientifically amazing. When light left those galaxies, the Universe was only about 3.5 billion years old! Remember, for a long time the whole cosmos was just gas, and that took a long time to collect, clump up, and form stars and galaxies. It’s currently thought that it took a few billion years for clusters of galaxies to form after the Big Bang, so JKCS041 looks like it was an early bloomer. We may find even more distant clusters, but there probably aren’t too many more out there, and they almost certainly won’t be much farther away than this one.
Clusters are among the largest structures in the Universe (the only things bigger are superclusters; clusters of clusters if you like), so studying them tells us a lot about conditions in the early Universe. And, of course, the farther back we find them the more interesting things get! I suspect that the newly-refurbished Hubble may be pointed this way sometime soon, too, and I also imagine JKCS041 will be a good target for the James Webb Space Telescope, which will be the largest space telescope ever launched. When it’s observed by these observatories, what secrets about dark matter, dark energy, and the early Universe will the cluster reveal?
And since I hate ending posts with rhetorical flourishes, I’ll take a stab at a generic answer: surprises. Whenever we probe deeper, look farther, the one thing we discover is that the Universe will always have something unexpected up its sleeve. That’s one reason science is so much fun!
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/INAF/S.Andreon et al Optical: DSS; ESO/VLT.
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(Via Bad Astronomy.)
Thia is nice view from my hospital and sunset ! If you look carefully you’ll see the ship in the bottom and island. Enjoy
This is crazy ! I love this! Check it out !
I just got idea obut music in my life! So , music is part of mine, is thing which is relaxing me! oh yeh! Guitar and classical music like this , simple note and here we are ….relax…
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