What will the next 10 years hold for astronomers, whether amateur or professional?
It’s a well known fact that the deeper you look into space, the farther back in time you can see. But what about the future? Like Lippershey, Newton and Jansky before them, today’s astronomers are constantly pushing science and technology forward to enable them to stare deeper and deeper into the cosmos. The next few years will see a host of new projects ‘come online’, providing completely new ways of viewing the universe–and, hopefuly, giving us some of the answers to astronomy’s biggest questions. Ahead of this new dawn, we asked eight experts for their predictions of what we can expect to learn from the skies in the decade to come…
FINDING EARTH’S TWIN
In late 2013 there was a much media attention when the Exosolar Planets Encyclopedia announced that there were now more than 1,000 on its list. “The 1,000 planet mark is largely arbitrary as a milestone,” admits astrobiologist and Sky at Night contributor Doctor Lewis Dartnell, “and it’s only by one count that we’ve passed 1,000. NASA, for example, keeps its own log, but it was as good a time as any to celebrate our successes in exoplanet detection, and to look to the future and what we hope to achieve in the coming years.”
Although mechanical failure curtailed NASA’s Kepler mission, Lewis is confident increasing numbers and sensitivities of planet-hunting telescopes will only add to the number of confirmed exoplanets. “What the next step will be, and what excites me in particular, is that very soon we’ll be stepping beyond just detecting planets,” he adds. “We’ll actually be able to characterise those planets, to read the spectra of their atmospheres and look for the fingerprints of particular gases.
“Although it’s an obvious truism that we’re hoping to find more planets in the future, the kind that we’re particularly interested in are the kind of world we’ve not yet discovered–an earth-mass planet in a habital orbit round a sun-like star,” he admits. “We haven’t found that magic combination of conditions or parameters yet. We hope that that will be coming very soon. Because if we’re right about the numbers, and about how solar systems form, then in the coming years we’ll find not just one Earth-like world but dozens of them. We will then have a shopping list of potential abodes for alien life, which we’ll then analyse one by one with these characterisation telescopes for the likes of oxygen and methane–for evidence of life!”
THE BIG, DARK QUESTIONS
“There are a lot of big questions around in astrophysics at the moment, many of which could come to fruition–or at least huge advancement–in the next 10 years,” insists Professor S Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Visiting professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford.
“On the scale of the whole universe there are the questions about Dark Energy and Dark Matter,” she explains. “I’m not quite sure how the answers will come about–particularly in the case of Dark Energy, which is the bigger unknown of the two–but I have a hunch that, when we understand Dark Energy, we’ll have a Paradigm Shift in how we understand the universe–I suspect it’s that big! Dark Matter is very interesting too because it looks as if it’s not made of the same stuff as the world we know. When we find out what it is, we’ll have a whole load of new physics to learn!”
Another of Jocelyn’s “hunches” concerns a more “traditional” branches of astronomy. “Up to now–particularly in optical, infra-red and ultraviolet astronomies–we’ve had to take very long exposures to see faint things,” she explains. “Radio astronomers are beginning to discover that there are very short events, lasting seconds or minutes, that previously got blurred, washed out. Now, with much better computing power, the likes of the intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF) can look for things that either change brightness or move quite rapidly. We’re going to find a lot of very interesting short, energetic things, and I haven’t a clue what they’ll be!
“There’s also a good possibility that we’re going to make direct detection of gravitational waves in that timescale. That would be a whole new way of looking at the cosmos, so I think it’s a really exciting time in astrophysics!”
THE GRAVITY OF THE SITUATION
If anyone is more excited about gravitational waves than Jocelyn, it’s almost certainly Professor Sheila Rowan, Director of the Institute for Gravitational Research at the University of Glasgow. “It’s a very different way to study astrophysical events and phenomena because we’re looking at the true gravitational signals coming from them,” she explains, when asked about their significance. “So for exciting events like two black holes interacting and coalescing, we will be able to see the gravitational effects–that’s something that we can’t really see any other way. It’s a really unique way to probe these kind of events, a completely new realm of exploring astrophysical objects.”
Part of her excitement is simply because it’s all been a long time coming; big projects–such as the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) facilities based in Louisiana and Washington State–have taken years to plan, build and, since 2010, upgrade with new sensors. “To now get to the point where we think that we’re going to make the first detections in the next five years, is fantastic,” she says.
British astrophysicists are part of the international effort at the heart of LIGO and the GEO 600 gravitational wave detector near Sarstedt in Germany, but cooperation also spreads out across scientific specialisms. “We’re working with the broader astronomy community,” Sheila explains, “because the types of event we’re interested in may have a counterpart in the elecromagnetic data. So if astronomers see an event, they let us know, and if we see something that looks interesting–that might be that kind of event–we let them know quickly to see if they can detect something in a different wavelength. That’s all very active during the last couple of years, and there’s good planning in place to ensure it continues during the next five years.”
DARK SKIES
For most of us, astronomy is first and foremost about the stars we can see above our heads yet, given that most of us live in towns and cities, light pollution is a real challenge. One response has been the creation of designated Dark-Skies Reserves; Galloway Forest Park in South West Scotland was Europe’s first in November 2009.
“The primary reason anyone is doing it in the UK is for off-season winter tourism and that, in itself, is allowing people who wouldn’t normally have known how to go about stargazing to try it,” believes Steve Owens, chair of the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) Dark Sky Places Development Committee. “We’re talking about people who’ve maybe watched Brian Cox on TV, seen a few documentaries or read a magazine or two–who are interested in doing it but not as a serious hobby.”
Nor is Dark-Sky designiation simply an award for areas that are intrinsically dark. “It’s actually about rewarding an area that has taken exceptional steps to ensure that darkness remains; that it shouldn’t deteriorate,” Steve says. That includes “exceptional” work by local councils such as Dumfries and Galloway, and Northumberland replacing their street lighting. “They’re refitting every single public streetlight in the whole of theiri areas to flat-glass LED warm white low colour temperature down-lighters, which is perfect for stargazing,” he says.
Steve’s also hopeful that, within 10 years, every single national park in the UK will have a Dark-Sky designation. “Their remit is to protect the natural and cultural heritage, but if they miss out the night sky, they’re missing out half of their natural and cultural heritage,” he insist. “Yes, it’s important to protect the trees, the fens and the moors, but it’s important to protect the night sky too.”
NUMBER CRUNCHING
“Astronomy has a long tradition of being surprised by things,” says Sky at Night presenter Chris Lintott, but he worries that the space for that may be lost in an avalanche of ever-increasing data. “If you take something like the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), the big radio telescope in development in southern Africa and Australia, that’ll produce roughly an Internet’s worth of data every day! The real challenge is to make sure we get the most out of that data and turn it into actual knowledge.”
Sometimes that can be acheived through clever processing, with automated systems weeding out unwanted data–fine, as long as you know what you’re looking for. But, as founder of the Zooniverse projects and Citizen Science Project Lead at the University of Oxford, Chris knows there’s more than just getting machines to be better at “signal processing”. “I think that’s the big challenge of, probably, the next 30 years, to be honest.”
Currently, Galaxy Zoo and its ilk depend upon the pattern-recognition abilities of the human brain. “You can certainly find people who will tell you that, in 30 years time, we’ll have walking, talking, dancing astronomer robots that will do all of this for you, but my bet is that there’ll always be a small proportion of the data–the really unusal, remarkable and slightly confusing stuff–that you’re going to want humans to look at,” Chris says. “So we’re working hard on how to combine the best of humans and machines. You want machines sitting on the back of the telescope, listening in or watching what comes in from the universe, but you probably want those machines to be able to call for help, to be able to say: ‘Actually, this is just weird, and a human should look at that’.”
OBSERVING FROM HOME
The last couple of decades have seen significant advances in home astronomy, and that’s unlikely to stop, according to BBC Sky at Night magazine’s own review editor, Paul Money. “Telescopes continue to become more automated and costs may fall allowing more beginners equipment to become GoTo,” he says.
“There will be more integration of digital viewing of a screen rather than by using an eyepiece as digital eyepieces/webcams become increasingly sensitive and give richly detailed full colour views of deep sky objects,” he adds. “Wireless control of telescopes, meantime, will also extend to wirelessly streaming ‘live’ views of the night sky into your living room, either onto your large flat screen TV or onto any of your mobile devices.”
Paul believes that social media and the internet will enable amateur astronomers in the UK to not only share remotely controlled observation sites around the globe, but also have more access to raw images from space-based observatories. “Amateurs will play an increasing role in processing professional data with increasing Pro-Am collaboration,” he adds.
As for imaging, Paul is sure that the manufacturers of cameras–be they CCD/Webcam DSLR–will continue to push sensitivity, making the acquisition of images much easier. “More fully integrated camera and telescopes combinations will become popular for those who just want to image rather than view,” he says. “Image stabilisation of telescopes will become more affordable, again upping the level of resolution for imaging in high resolution. And Hydrogen Alpha technology will be much more affordable , with amateurs using other more obscure wavelengths too to view and image the Sun.
“Software both on PCs and mobile devices will push the processing limits to the extreme,” Paul adds, “allowing ‘on the fly’ processing of the ever more detailed images being taken.”
SOLAR SYSTEM
Until fairly recently, astronomers studying solar system physics faced one major challenge; they only had one example to work from. As Professor Manuel Grande, of Aberystwyth University, points out, the growing list of confirmed exoplanets now mean “that the whole story of how the solar system got here is really up for grabs. When you look at extra-solar solar systems, it’s not obvious that our solar system–with nice round planetary orbits, and all the planets on the same plane–is the norm.”
As organiser of the European Planetary Science Congress, Manuel has a good overview of current and future-planned investigations of the solar system, and is looking forward to both the European Space Agency (ESA) Rosetta mission to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014, and NASA’s Dawn probe, now en-route to dwarf planet Ceres after visiting proto-planet Vesta. He’s currently working on the ESA JUpiter ICy moon Explorer (JUICE), which will “characterise” the Jovian moons Ganymede, Callisto and Europa.
Closer to home, cosmically speaking, Manuel would still like to see some new ‘collect and return’ lunar missions. “There are still big questions about the early solar system, about the early solar environment, which I think can only be answered by bringing back samples from the South Pole-Aitken Basin, that huge impact basin on the dark side of the Moon,” he says.
As for the question of non-terrestrial life? “The work that’s been done recently with Mars, in terms of understanding the history of water there, and whether there’s ever been habitable environments there, is wonderful,” he says. “I think we’re learning a tremendous result about what could make a habital environment. And I think going to Europa, and indeed asteroids, will tell us a lot about the possibilities in other places as well.”
BIG CAN BE BETTER
Most people in Britain have heard of the Hubble Space Telescope, but will the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), expected to launch in 2018, achieve the same public profile? Absolutely, at least if Maggie Aderin Pocock, research fellow at the University College London Department of Science and Technology Studies, has any say in the matter!
“Big is not always better but in the case of JWST, big certainly helps,” she says. “Big means more light gathering power, so that fainter objects can be seen more clearly, and a larger mirror also means a better resolving power. I can’t wait to see the images it produces!
JWST is not just a bigger version of Hubble, though; it detects near and mid infrared, and it won’t be in reasonably accessible close Earth-orbit. “Unfortunately there are lot of other infrared sources– including the Earth and, most brightly, the Sun–in space, so to get away from these the JWST will sit 1.5 million miles away from Earth at a position called Lagrange point 2. From this remote location the Earth will help protect JWST from the Sun’s glare.”
To pick up the infrared light the mirrors of the JWST will be covered in a very thin layer of gold, as this best reflects those frequencies; space bling-credentials notwithstanding, what’s the goal of JWST? “It will take on many of the big questions,” says Maggie. “Its primary goal is to study galaxy, star and planet formation, to see the very first stars and galaxies form in the early Universe after the Big Bang and how they evolved into their current form. The telescope will also look at exoplanet systems and may even help answer the age old question: ‘Are we alone in the Universe?’” Maybe JWST for the history books after all!
First published in the BBC Sky at Night magazine #104 (January 2014)
