Scientists are supercharging one of the most powerful telescopes on Earth with a new technology that will reveal how the Milky Way galaxy formed billions of years ago.
They will link a super-fast mapping device to the William Herschel Telescope (WHT), located in La Palma, Spain, that will enable it to survey approximately 1,000 stars per hour until it can catalog 5 million stars. The data will be analyzed to investigate the make-up of each star and the speed of light, showing how the Milky Way galaxy was built up.
History of Milky Way
In ancient times, a number of civilizations looked at the night sky and gazed upon the vast trail of stars and dust that split the sky. For Greeks, they saw a stream of milk. The term galaxy was derived from the Greek word gala, which means milk. The term galaxy has been used as a generic term for star systems since the 19th century.
By the 20th century, astronomers discovered that the Milky Way galaxy contains many stars; since then, they have penned their galactic origin story.
One of the famous stories about the Milky Way galaxy is that it formed 14 billion years ago when enormous clouds of gas and dust combined due to a force called gravity, Quantum Magazine reported.
Over time, a vast spherical halo and a dense, bright disk emerged where different star systems, including the Solar System, formed inside the disk. For billions of years, the Solar System spun inside that disk that gives the edge-on-view of the disk splashed across the night sky, which is why humans can see spilled milk.
But as technology advances, humans uncover a major chapter of the history of the Milky Way galaxy. For instance, the ESA spacecraft Gaia released some information about the galaxy in 2018 after years of observing roughly 1 billion stars. The data showed some parts of the disk that appeared ancient and some evidence of epic collisions that shaped the violent youth of the Milky Way.
These new data have spun a new story of how the Milky Way galaxy formed and evolved, indicating that the galaxy is not a static object and will continuously change. This time, researchers will be using a novel technology that will also help investigate the origins of the Milky Way.
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New Device for WHT
Professor Gavin Dalton of Oxford University had developed the new instrument called WHT Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer (WEAVE) for over a decade. He is now beyond excited as it will be used to supercharge WHT. The new device is considered a miracle of engineering with its 80,000 separate parts that serve an important purpose for identifying thousands of stars.
According to BBC News, the nimble robotic fingers of WEAVE carefully place a fiber optic that is precisely on each location on a plate towards a specific star. These fiber optics act as tiny telescopes that capture light from a single star and channel it to another instrument split into a rainbow spectrum that unravels the origin and history of the star.
This process is completed in one hour as the fiber optics for the next thousand stars are positioned to a reversed side of the plate to analyze the next set of targets once the previous survey is done.
WEAVE can calculate the speed, direction, age, and composition of the stars that it catalogs to create a picture of stars moving in the galaxy, reconstructing the entire formation of the Milky Way in unprecedented detail.
It will also reveal traces of galaxies that the Milky Way galaxy has absorbed over its history and see how the absorption triggers the formation of new stars. Dr. Marc Balcells told BBC News that WEAVE would lead to a big shift in the understanding of how galaxies form.
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