ESO’s fleet of telescopes in Chile have detected the first visible counterpart to a gravitational wave source. These historic observations suggest that this unique object is the result of the merger of two neutron stars. The cataclysmic aftermaths of this kind of merger — long-predicted events called kilonovae — disperse heavy elements such as gold and platinum throughout the Universe. This discovery, published in several papers in the journal Nature and elsewhere, also provides the strongest evidence yet that short-duration gamma-ray bursts are caused by mergers of neutron stars.
.. As night fell in Chile many telescopes peered at this patch of sky, searching for new sources. These included
- ESO’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) and VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at the Paranal Observatory, the
- Italian Rapid Eye Mount (REM) telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory, the
- LCO 0.4-meter telescope at Las Cumbres Observatory, and the
- American DECam at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory.
- The Swope 1-metre telescope was the first to announce a new point of light.
It appeared very close to NGC 4993, a lenticular galaxy in the constellation of Hydra, and VISTA observations pinpointed this source at infrared wavelengths almost at the same time. As night marched west across the globe,
- the Hawaiian island telescopes Pan-STARRS and Subaru also picked it up and watched it evolve rapidly.
.. “ESO’s great strength is that it has a wide range of telescopes and instruments to tackle big and complex astronomical projects, and at short notice. We have entered a new era of multi-messenger astronomy!” concludes Andrew Levan, lead author of one of the papers.
A Mistranslated Word Led To Some Of The Best Fake News Of The 20th Century
A translation error is pretty much responsible for a generation of science fiction (which was initially published directly in the mainstream press as science fact).
.. Giovanni Schiaparelli was an Italian astronomer who, upon observing Mars in 1877, claimed to see channels running over the planet’s surface. In time, this would be recognized as an illusion, but “in time” was several decades. His word choice to describe the channels — “canali” — was mistranslated in English as canals.
.. when Percival Lowell (founder of the Lowell Observatory) read that there were canals on Mars, he ran with it, considering them actual irrigation systems after his initial observations of the planet in 1894.
.. Lowell claimed that the canals were incontrovertibly real and that their presence proved the existence of Martians
.. Next time a New York Times reporter gives an upstart publication guff about clickbait, refer them to the masterpiece of fan fiction published in 1906 under the headline “THERE IS LIFE ON THE PLANET MARS.”2
.. lots of people — particularly the English astronomy community — thought the Martian theory was bunk, but so many people did not.
.. Canal enthusiast Kaempffert became the Times’ science editor in 1927, a post he held for 26 years
.. Mary Proctor speculated that vast armies and fleets could be warring on the planet just as they were in the contemporary Russo-Japanese war and in the Crimean War.4
The Universe Just Got 10 Times More Interesting
New research estimates there are 2 trillion galaxies in the observable region of the cosmos, an order of magnitude more than previously thought.
Astronomers at the University of Nottingham now say the number of galaxies in the observable Universe is 2 trillion, more than 10 times as many as previously thought.
.. There’s only one way to count galaxies with existing technology: Point a telescope at a small chunk of sky, tally up the number you see, and then extrapolate that across the whole sky.
.. “It boggles the mind that over 90 percent of the galaxies in the [observable] Universe have yet to be studied,”
Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious
But seen from Earth, stars appear as dots of certain sizes or magnitudes. The only way stars could be so incredibly distant and have such sizes was if they were all incredibly huge, every last one dwarfing the Sun. Tycho Brahe, the most prominent astronomer of the era and a favourite of the Establishment, thought this was absurd, while Peter Crüger, a leading Polish mathematician, wondered how the Copernican system could ever survive in the face of the star-size problem.
.. Brahe had theorised that all planets circled the Sun, while it circled Earth. Locher noted that Brahe might be right, but what was clear was that the telescope supported Ptolemy.
.. But the telescopically discovered moons of Jupiter were proof of epicyclic motion: the moons rode in circles around Jupiter, while those circles rode with Jupiter on its orbit. The telescope had proven Ptolemy correct; it was just that Venus and sunspots (and maybe all the planets) had their epicycles centred on the Sun.
.. Unfortunately for Locher, he turned out to be wrong about the Earth not moving (the apparent sizes of stars would be shown to be spurious, an effect of optics).
Worse, Galileo in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632) made sport of a certain ‘booklet of theses’, namely Locher’sDisquisitions, quoting from it without identifying its author or title. He caricatured Disquisitions, then ridiculed the caricature, portraying the ‘booklet’ as the work of a befuddled establishmentarian, hung up on the ancient idea of an immobile Earth. Galileo gave no clue that the ‘booklet’s’ author was complimentary to him, excited about new telescopic discoveries, encouraging further telescopic research, and wielding solid arguments against Earth’s motion. Locher was forgotten, while Galileo’s caricature became accepted as history, and applied to the entire debate over Earth’s motion.
That is unfortunate for science, because today the opponents of science make use of that caricature. Those who insist that the Apollo missions were faked, that vaccines are harmful, or even that the world is flat – whose voices are now loud enough for the ‘War on Science’ to be a National Geographiccover story and for the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson to address even their most bizarre claims – do not reject the scientific process per se. Rather, they wrap themselves in the mantle of Galileo, standing (supposedly) against a (supposedly) corrupted science produced by the ‘Scientific Establishment’. Thus Locher matters. Science’s history matters. Anti-Copernicans such as Locher and Brahe show that science has always functioned as a contest of ideas, and that science was present in both sides of the vigorous debate over Earth’s motion.