CSO
joined a special live event called "Around the World in 80
Telescopes" of the 100 Hours of Astronomy. 
There are many
astronomical events planned this year, the International Year of Astronomy
2009.
There was a special live event called "Around
the World in 80
Telescopes" of the
100
Hours of
Astronomy, led by the European Southern Observatory (ESO).
The Caltech Submillimeter Observatory
joined the special live show, and the broadcast of the CSO portion
started around 2:15 am in
Hawaiian Standard Time on the 3rd of April 2009 (Figure 1).
Dr. C. Darren Dowell is a senior scientist at the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory (JPL) and the California
Institute of Technology (Caltech). He led the
development of CSO's submillimeter camera,
SHARCII. Dr.
Dowell has been studying the Galactic Center which harbors a
supermassive blackhole.
He and his colleagues are looking for small explosions of gas which
spirals
on to the blackhole with
very high speeds, near the speed of light. With the CSO alone,
Dr.
Dowell can measure small flares at
submillimeter wavelengths (Figure 2), occurring 1/10 of Astronomical
Unit of scale around the supermassive
blackhole. To resolve such fine detail features of the flares,
Dr. Dowell and his colleagues link up
a few telescopes in Hawaii, CSO, JCMT, and the SMA, and on the U.S.
mainland, one in California and
one in Arizona to form a huge interferometer called Very Long Baseline
Interferometer (VLBI). With that
long separation between the telescopes, one can achieve very fine
angular resolution and start resolving
the features surrounding the blackhole. They start to see
distributions of the gas right
around the blackhole
with this very special instrument.
You can watch the live show at the CSO on the
100 Hours of Astronomy
web site. You can
also watch the 6 minutes short movie of the CSO on the following web
site:
CSO
Movie low resolution [27MB]
CSO
Movie higher resolution [1.2GB]
You can find a detailed explanation of the short movie here.
Figure 1. Dr.
Dowell speaking to Nadine Neumayer at ESO over the live interview.
Figure 2. Left:
Submillimeter image of the galactic center region mapped over the size
of the full moon (0.5 degrees across)
using the SHARCII at the CSO, in the constellation Sagittarius.
The green circle at the center of the map is the region
Dr. Dowell and his colleagues were targeting that night.
Right: Zoomed-in images near the supermassive blackhole.
Red arrows point towards a small dot right in the middle. This is
the emission of the medium near the blackhole.
The spot in the left grey diagram is a little brighter than the spot in
the diagram on the right side. This is called to a "flare"
event".
Flares are explosions of the gas towards the blackhole. These
flare
events are observed in different electromagnetic spectrum,
from X ray to radio, and there are time delays of the event over
different wavelengths.
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Scientific Results at the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory
