Astronomers usually deal with the very, very big—huge telescopes, giant galaxies, and massive exploding stars.
But one of the most revolutionary astronomy tools of the decade is a mini satellite the size of a bread box.
The satellite will act as an artificial star for astronomers to observe from the ground, allowing them to more accurately measure the brightness of a space object and better understand some of the biggest mysteries in 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 researcher at Lowell Observatory who studies stellar astronomy and exoplanets, told Business Insider. “It’s something that will help all astronomers.”
A revolutionary new tool for astronomers
The mini-satellite, called a CubeSat, is designed to orbit Earth from 22,236 miles away. At that distance, its speed will match Earth’s rotation, so the satellite will appear fixed in the night sky and be an easy target for tracking telescopes.
You will not be able to see it with 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 vehicle of its kind.
“This is really new for us to have some sort of artificial star citation 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 will know exactly how much light it emits.
The CubeSat, named Landolt for the late astronomer Arlo Landolt, will fire lasers with a specific number of light particles, or photons, which astronomers can use to calibrate their telescopes to measure light.
This could help eliminate many of the guesswork astronomers now make when using real stars to calibrate their instruments.
The problem is, there’s no way to know exactly how much light real stars emit, because we can’t send a probe to accurately measure its brightness, Richey-Yowell said. In addition, the Earth’s atmosphere absorbs a lot of light from space, which can also affect the calibration of astronomers.
“That’s why this Landolt mission is so important,” Richey-Yowell said. “If we send a mission like this where we know exactly how many photons, how much light per second, is coming from this CubeSat,” then we can use that to more accurately compare and measure light from other objects, like real ones. the stars, she said.
The mission is expected to help astronomers measure the light emitted by stars with 10 times more precision than current estimates, LiveScience reported.
It’s like being given a 1,000 piece puzzle that only had half the amount of pieces, and then someone gifting you a few hundred more pieces. Landolt will help astronomers pick up small details they otherwise missed in the data.
How Landolt was able to revolutionize astronomy
“All of our astronomy is based on light, and so we really need to know how much light we’re actually getting,” Richey-Yowell said.
You can learn a lot from a beam of light: a star’s temperature, its mass, the types of exoplanets orbiting it, and whether they could potentially harbor life.
For example, knowing how hot a host star is can tell you how far away an exoplanet needs to be in order to hold liquid water on its surface, Richey-Yowell said. Water is one of the key ingredients for life as we know it, and one of the main characteristics astrobiologists look for when discovering potential planets that could harbor life.
Finding more Earth-like planets is just the beginning. Astronomers can also use Landolt to measure the light from exploding distant stars, called supernovae, that help calculate the expansion rate of the universe.
Right now, cosmologists studying the expansion of the universe face a huge challenge: they can’t settle on a single value for the expansion rate. Some methods lead to one value while others lead to a slightly different value. This puzzle may be the key to understanding some of the universe’s greatest mysteries, such as understanding the invisible force tearing our universe apart that we call dark energy.
“So really everything from tiny and tiny planets to the whole scale of the universe relies on our understanding of stars and how bright they are and what kind of light they’re giving off,” Richey-Yowell said. “I really think it’s going to be revolutionary for astronomy.”
This article was originally published by Business Insider.
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