Telescope to unlock mysteries
2008-06-11 07:15
Cape Canaveral - A hi-tech telescope Nasa plans to launch on Wednesday hopes to fling open a new window on the universe, exploring extreme sources of gamma-rays that point to powerful and exotic phenomena.
The Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, or Glast, will search for energy blasts that point to black holes and other beasts and hunt for clues to explain the strange, magnetised neutron stars known as pulsars.
The telescope may also unlock the mysteries of dark matter, which comprises about 25% of mass in the universe but is invisible to the naked eye, compared with the 5% of visible matter.
The remaining 70% is known as "dark energy", a little understood phenomenon which is believed to speed the expansion of the universe.
Scientists hope to gain vital information about the birth and evolution of the cosmos and study how black holes can spew jets of gas at stupendous speeds, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa).
"Glast will give us a spectacular high-energy gamma-ray vision," Glast deputy project scientist David Thompson told a press conference.
"The Universe looks remarkably different outside the narrow range of colours in the spectrum that we can see with our eyes."
"There's a broad science community that's anxiously awaiting this launch," said Steven Ritz, a Glast project scientist and astrophysicist at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Centre.
Through gamma-ray eyes, though, "the Milky Way would be a brilliant swath of light, and you would see a sky constantly changing with objects dimming and brightening on different times scales", Thompson said.
In its first year, Glast will focus on mapping the heavens with unprecedented optical sensitivity that should allow it to discover between 5 000 and 10 000 sources of gamma rays, experts said.
The facility also features the Glast Burst Monitor, or GBM, equipped to observe gamma-ray bursts, believed to be caused by the collapse of rapidly spinning black holes.
Gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful and luminous explosions in the universe since the Big Bang.