Astronomers usually deal with very, very big things – big telescopes, huge galaxies, and exploding stars of enormous proportions.
But one of the most revolutionary astronomy tools of the decade is a mini-satellite the size of a lunchbox.
The satellite will act like an artificial star for astronomers observing it from the ground, allowing them to more accurately measure the brightness of space objects and better understand some of the greatest mysteries of our universe, such as dark energy.
NASA recently approved the $19.5 million Landolt space mission to launch the mini-satellite into Earth orbit.
“This is really great science that NASA is supporting,” Tyler Richey-Yowell, a postdoctoral fellow at the Lowell Observatory who studies stellar astronomy and exoplanets, told Business Insider. “This is something that will help all astronomers.”
A revolutionary new tool for astronomers
The mini-satellite, called CubeSat, is designed to orbit the Earth at a distance of 36,700 kilometers. At this distance, its speed will match the Earth’s rotation, making the satellite appear stationary in the night sky and an easy-to-track target for telescopes.
It will not be visible to the naked eye, but to telescopes it will look like a star. The mission is scheduled to launch in 2029. It will be the first instrument of its kind.
“It’s really new for us to have some kind of artificial star up there that we can rely on and use,” Richey-Yowell told BI.
What makes this “artificial star” better than a real one is that astronomers know exactly how much light it emits.
The CubeSat, named after the late astronomer Arlo Landolt, will fire lasers containing a specific number of light particles, or photons, that astronomers can use to calibrate their telescopes to measure light.
This avoids much of the guesswork that astronomers face today when using real stars to calibrate their instruments.
The problem is that you can’t say exactly how much light real stars emit because you can’t send a probe to a star to measure its brightness precisely, Richey-Yowell said. In addition, Earth’s atmosphere absorbs a lot of light from space, which can also affect astronomers’ calibrations.
“That’s why this Landolt mission is so important,” Richey-Yowell said. “If we launch a mission like this where we know exactly how many photons, how much light per second, are coming from this CubeSat,” then we can use it to compare and more accurately measure the light from other objects, like real stars, she said.
According to LiveScience, the mission will help astronomers measure the light emitted by stars ten times more accurately than currently estimated.
It’s like when you get a 1,000-piece puzzle that only has half the pieces, and then someone gives you a few hundred more. Landolt will help astronomers see tiny details they would otherwise have missed in the data.
How Landolt could revolutionize astronomy
“All of our astronomy is based on light, so we really need to know how much light we are actually receiving,” Richey-Yowell said.
There is a lot that can be learned from a beam of light: the temperature of a star, its mass, the type of exoplanets orbiting it and whether it could possibly host life.
For example, knowing how hot a star is can tell you how far away an exoplanet needs to be for liquid water to exist on its surface, Richey-Yowell said. Water is one of the key ingredients for life as we know it, and one of the key features astrobiologists look for when searching for potential planets that could host life.
The search for Earth-like planets is just the beginning. Astronomers can also use Landolt to measure the light from distant exploding stars, called supernovas, which helps calculate the expansion rate of the universe.
Cosmologists studying the expansion of the universe currently face a major challenge: they cannot agree on a single value for the expansion rate. Some methods lead to one particular value, while others lead to a slightly different one. This puzzle could hold the key to solving some of the universe’s greatest mysteries, such as understanding the invisible force tearing our universe apart that we call dark energy.
“So everything from small, tiny planets to the entire universe depends on our understanding of the stars, how bright they are and what kind of light they emit,” Richey-Yowell said. “I really believe this is going to be a revolution for astronomy.”
This article was originally published by Business Insider.
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