The world’s most advanced telescopes weren’t built for today’s temperatures, and they mess with our observations of the night sky.
Three decades of value data – the home of the Paranal Observatory (the European Southern Observatory’s very large telescope (VLT)) in northern Chile – reveals many ways in which climate change is already affecting astronomical observations. And many ways in which it can go bad.
VLT sits in the Antakama Desert, the driest place on Earth outside of the Antarctic.
The rest of the world has averaged 1 degree Celsius since the pre-industrial age, while Atkama has averaged 1.5 degrees Celsius in the last four decades.
VLT is simply not designed for such hot conditions. For the first time, its cooling system will not work properly if the sunset temperature is above 16 C. And yet many years have seen a growing number of occasions where daytime temperatures have exceeded this threshold.
This means that when the dome opens, the outside temperature is warmer than the inner dome, and this internal turbulence can cause a decrease in image resolution, astronomers say ‘dome seeing’.
Inevitably, this temperature causes turbulence inside the dome, which destabilizes the image quality and causes blurring.
Outside of the dome, changes in the atmosphere are also affecting the turbulence in the atmosphere, and the authors of this new study reported an increase in instability in the air near the ground, which also caused blurring in the images.
Given the recent construction changes in the landscape, the team cannot directly link this change to global warming, but it will speak to the greater potential danger of our planet warming faster.
There are also many cutting edge tools installed on binoculars, which are sensitive to local climate change.
Despite the Atkema desert, the region is still closely tied to El Ni નિo events and the summer monsoon, both of which are forecast to intensify under future climate change. But to take infrared observations of the night sky, the amount of water vapor in the air must be low.
Southern subtropical jet currents, which, in turn, are also affected by El Niનોo, are also responsible for producing ‘wind-driven haloes’ – where atmospheric turbulent conditions change rapidly, the telescopic control system cannot improve for them.
“This limits the conflicting capabilities of the tool and may limit the potential explanatory study,” the authors explain.
“Increasing water vapor in the atmosphere can reduce astronomical signals.”
Relative humidity and cloud coverage can also mess with observations of sublime and radio wavelengths, and data indicate that in the future Atacama will become drier, we still need more research on the local and global climate and all its various complications. Before we can say for sure.
If the world heats up by more than 4 degrees Celsius before the end of the century – a very bad situation – a team of astronomers, meteorologists and meteorologists say our images of the night sky will probably only become blurred.
That’s why we should build future telescopes with extreme warming scenarios in mind, as they say, otherwise our technology won’t be good.
“Each telescope site is likely to have its own microclimate which calls for individual study,” but we have highlighted three different areas – dome viewing, surface-level atmospheres and wind-powered halo effects – that would be increasingly detrimental to astronomical observations at Paranal. Effect, as the weather reverses worse. ”
And there is another message from the authors. His paper connects with the other six articles in the current issue Nature astronomy, Dedicated to raising awareness about climate change and how it affects our view of space.
While astronomy is often not linked to climate change, planetary scientists and astronomers can bring unique perspectives to research on our own planet.
In the past, astronomers have expressed concern over geo-conceptual solutions, which they worry could make the night sky brighter or cloudy and make crisp astronomical observations more challenging.
“[A]Powerful people know that the origin of life on earth was a complex process, made possible by the coincidence of extremely rare circumstances.
“There is no other earth in our neighborhood.”
The study was published in Nature astronomy.
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