Welcome to the April newsletter
It has been a busy start to the year and in particular we were excited to see the fifth primary mirror segment come out of the furnace at the Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab at the University of Arizona. You can see some great behind-the-scenes pictures of the progress of our fifth mirror in this newsletter.
In other news, you will meet an important addition to the team building the GMT - Ricardo Glade from WSP, GMTO's construction management company. You can also find out how the University of Texas at Austin will be helping GMT see into the dusty clouds where stars and planets are born.
GMT has also been busy talking to, and listening to, the community - both at January's American Astronomical Society meeting and in Chile. Read about these events below.
Finally, registration has opened for GMTO's sixth annual Community Science Meeting. This year's topic, the birth and death of stars, promises to generate fascinating discussion. If this is your field of astronomy we hope you can join us.
Remember you can always keep up to date with what's happening at GMTO from our website, gmto.org, or from our presence on social media.
-Dr. Patrick McCarthy
|
WSP selected as GMTO's Construction Management company
|
|  | | Ricardo Glade, WSP | |
In January, GMTO announced the selection of WSP, a global engineering and professional services consultancy, to manage the construction activities on the GMT site in Chile. Construction work on the site involves many interdependent activities that need to be coordinated so that work is carried out efficiently and safely. WSP will draw upon its global organization and capabilities which includes Poch, a 730-employee engineering and environmental consulting company based in Chile that was acquired by WSP in July 2017.
A key person in this activity is Ricardo Glade of WSP. Ricardo is a project manager and engineer with many years of experience in the region. For this newsletter, Ricardo answered a few questions about his work on this project.
Read Ricardo's profile here.
|
Lifting the veil on star formation: A University of Texas instrument for the GMT
The Milky Way galaxy contains roughly 100 billion stars and new stars are being born at the rate of about one per year. Star formation is one of the most common events in the universe - roughly 5000 stars are born each second throughout the cosmos. Despite this being such a ubiquitous phenomenon, star formation is not well understood. Building a complete physical theory of star and planet formation is one of the major outstanding challenges in astrophysics.
Part of the difficulty stems from the fact that the birth of stars happens behind a curtain - the dense clouds of molecular gas and interstellar dust grains that play a key role in star formation also absorb light and obscure our view of the process. Infrared radiation - light with wavelengths between roughly 1 and 100 microns - penetrates the dust shrouding young stars and gives us a view of the star formation process and newly formed stars within their dusty cocoons.
University of Texas at Austin (UT) professor of astronomy and Vice President for Research Dan Jaffe is a world leading expert in both the study of young stars and the infrared instrumentation needed to observe them. Prof. Jaffe is engineering a state-of-the-art infrared spectrograph - the GMT Near-IR Spectrograph (GMTNIRS) - that builds on his deep experience with infrared instruments for ground- and space-based telescopes.
GMTNIRS will not only allow astronomers to peer into stellar nurseries, it will also be used to probe the atmospheres of planets as they pass in front of their parent stars. Atmospheric gases, such as water, carbon monoxide, methane and oxygen each leave a distinct imprint on the spectrum of the starlight that has passed through the atmosphere. Some of these molecules, particularly oxygen and methane, can be indicators of biochemical processes and hence can reveal the presence of life on other planets.
Continue reading...
|
GMT's 5th Mirror revealed
The fifth primary mirror for the GMT was cast at the Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab at the University of Arizona in November of last year. In early February, after three months of careful cooling, the glass had finished annealing and the furnace was opened. After cleaning and inspection, the mirror was lifted off the furnace floor in early April. Damien Jemison, GMTO's Creative Art Director, was there to capture footage of these processes.
|
Registration opens for 6th Annual GMT Community Science Meeting
The Sixth Annual GMT Community Science Meeting, sponsored by the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization, will be held from September 13-15, 2018 in Honolulu, Hawaii.
While stars spend most of their lives as stable, fusion-powered objects, stellar birth and death involve some of the most dramatic and diverse physical processes known to astrophysicists. Stellar beginnings are shrouded in dust and difficult to observe, and the next generation of large telescopes will offer transformative opportunities to understand this first chapter of the star formation story. Stellar death is often explosive, and new data on transient objects offers great opportunities for advancing our understanding of the last chapter of the stellar story. This conference brings together experts in the fields of star formation and stellar disruptions, eruptions and explosions.
The conference will focus on key open questions that can be solved in the upcoming era of extremely large telescopes.
|
Astronomy with All Senses - Outreach in Chile
GMTO is engaged in an education program in Chile to inspire appreciation and knowledge of astronomy through all the senses, with a particular focus on accessibility to blind and visually impaired people. Astronomy with All Senses is a project developed by Parque Explora and Planetario Medellín (Colombia) and funded by the International Astronomical Union. Fully contained in a traveler's backpack, the project materials consist of carefully designed tactile materials which enable access to astronomy for people of all ages, backgrounds and capabilities.
|
GMT at the 231st American Astronomical Society meeting
GMTO participated in the 231st American Astronomical Society meeting in January, as a sponsor and as an exhibitor. GMTO also held an Open House attended by over 100 people. At the Open House, GMTO Board members Charles Alcock (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and Taft Armandroff (The University of Texas at Austin) gave a brief update on the status of the GMTO organization, Carnegie Institution for Science astronomer Alycia Weinberger reviewed the progress towards the release of the 2018 Science Book, and Patrick McCarthy briefed everyone on the current project status.
|
|
