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 PR20100617
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MPE Press Release June 17, 2010 |
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Astronomers' first "movie of the sky": Pan-STARRS survey starts science missionThe Pan-STARRS project has begun a unique program of observing three quarters of the night sky: the systematic search for astronomical objects that change over time. Its data will enable astronomers to search for dangerous asteroids on a possible collision course with Earth, but also to tackle some of astronomy's deepest mysteries: Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Scientists of the Max Planck Institutes for Astronomy and for Extraterrestrial Physics are involved in a number of the survey's key projects, including searches for extra-solar planets, for "failed stars" known as Brown Dwarfs, and for distant active galaxies.
"Every month, Pan-STARRS1 will observe one sixth of the sky at five different wavelengths" explains Dr. Roberto Saglia of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. "In this way, we can track changes in brightness. We can also use our data for an especially deep look into certain regions of the sky." These regions are observed every night. The resulting data will also be used to draw a particularly detailed three-dimensional map of the Milky Way Galaxy, our cosmic home, and to produce a complete inventory of variable astronomical objects for our cosmic neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy. Pan-STARRS1 also acts as a classical survey, where astronomers look for known types of celestial objects. It will search, among other things, for extremely faint and red objects, such as Brown Dwarfs (objects that do not have sufficient mass to evolve into proper stars) and the earliest active galaxies ("quasars at redshift z=7") at distances of more than 13 billion light-years. Another part of the search has a very practical goal: Pan-STARRS1 is set to chart asteroids that could potentially collide with Earth in a catastrophic "global impact" event. Conceived and designed at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy (IfA), the Pan-STARRS1 observatory sits atop the dormant volcano Haleakala but is operated remotely from the Advanced Technology Research Center in Pukalani, Maui. The telescope currently in operation, PanSTARRS1 (PS1) is the prototype whose operation is meant to lead to a larger, more complete survey involving four telescopes of the same type. "PS1 has been taking science-quality data for six months, but now we are doing it dusk-to-dawn every night," says Dr. Nick Kaiser, the IfA scientist who is the principal investigator of the Pan-STARRS project. This marks the transition from the telescope's commissioning and testing phase to science operations.
With a 1.8-meter primary mirror, the PS1 telescope is modest in size - at least by the standards of modern professional astronomy. But PS1 has unique properties, namely an extraordinary field of view more than thirty times the size of the full moon. Mounted on the back of the telescope is the 1.4-Gigapixel camera (which is about the size of a telephone booth) that makes PS1 the world's most powerful survey telescope. Now that the PS1 telescope has started to take data, the observatory will produce several Petabytes of data over the next years, enough to fill on the order of 1000 DVDs every night. To master this relentless stream of data, a new Pan-STARRS1 computer cluster was built at the Garching computer centre. With 150 TB of storage space on hard disc for rapid data reduction and analysis, long-term storage on magnetic tapes, and 700 CPUs, this new cluster is hard at work churning through the first Pan-STARRS1 survey data. The analysis employs custom-made software that enables astronomers to automate the first steps in the classification of the astronomical objects observed, providing automatic measurements of key properties such as the temperature and metallicity of stars, or the redshift of distant objects. More information about Pan-STARRS Pan-STARRS (short for "Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System") combines a superb observing site with the technical and the scientific expertise available in Hawaii and among the collaboration's international partners. Funding for the development of the observing system has been provided by the U.S. Air Force. The project plans to build the full four-telescope Pan-STARRS array that will quadruple the light-gathering capability of PS1. Pan-STARRS1 is the first large-scale optical survey since the ten-year Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS); in contrast with SDSS, Pan-STARRS1 observations include the main plane of the Milky Way galaxy, promising a wealth of data about our cosmic home. Pan-STARRS1 will collect optical and infrared data like SDSS in the standard filters g, r, i, and z, but also in the y-band to take advantage of the excellent detector capabilities of Pan-STARRS in the near infrared. The PS1 Surveys have been made possible through contributions of the PS1 Science Consortium: One third of the contributions come from the Institute for Astronomy, the University of Hawaii with its Pan-STARRS Project Office; an additional third is provided by the Max-Planck Society and its participating institutes, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching; the remaining third is provided by a consortium of institutions mostly from the US and the UK: the Johns Hopkins University; the University of Durham; the University of Edinburgh; the Queen's University Belfast; the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; the Los Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, Inc.; and the National Central University of Taiwan. More information on the PS1 science Consortium:  http://ps1sc.org
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Last update: 2010-06-17 by
 H. SteinleContact: MPE public outreach department |
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