Profs help develop telescope

Pitt researchers joined in the development of the first Large Synoptic Survey Telescope last… Pitt researchers joined in the development of the first Large Synoptic Survey Telescope last July. With the help of two recent donations, construction of the telescope, which can photograph expanses far larger than today’s telescopes can, will move forward this spring.

Donations of $10 million and $2 million came respectively from Bill Gates and the Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences, which was created by Charles Simonyi of Microsoft.

Jeffery Newman, assistant professor of astronomy at Pitt, has been working with the LSST project director, J. Anthony Tyson, of the University of California at Davis, since 2006.

Pitt is one of 23 partner institutions working on LSST. Carnegie Mellon University joined on Jan. 2.

“LSST is different from traditional telescopes because it can look at very large areas at once,” Newman said.

The telescope is located on Cerro Pachon, a mountain located in northern Chile.

In late March, with help from the recent donations, the telescope’s mirrors will begin to be cast. The project will then proceed with ten years of constantly monitoring the sky.

“The LSST is big and covers a wide area and can take images of the whole sky every few days so you can see if anything is changing over even very rapid time scales,” Newman said.

With such a vast amount of images, data can be analyzed over months, weeks or just minutes.

“The main goal of LSST is to study the phenomena that dark energy impacts and the evolution of the universe over time,” Newman said.

By studying dark energy, the expansion of the universe can be monitored.

Newman’s area of focus has been on developing scales to measure distances in space so that changes in the universe over LSST’s observation period can be monitored accurately.

“LSST is so big and will have such statistical power that the errors will be very small,” said Newman.

According to a press release, Pitt astronomy professor Arthur Kosowsky, assistant professor Andrew Zentner and computer science professors Panos K. Crysanthis and Alexandros Labrinidis are also involved in the LSST project.

Once LSST is developed and the photo taking is underway, Google Inc. will develop ways to handle the vast amounts of data collected – which is projected to be 30 trillion bytes of data per night.

“Google is involved in the engineering of the telescope,” Newman said.

“The question is, how do you handle such a large set of data? And this is something they’re used to dealing with.”

Newman is no stranger to dealing with Google and, in turn, Google is no stranger to working with the cosmos either.

In October, Google came out with Google Sky – the astronomical equivalent to Google Earth.

“I worked with them to take one piece of sky that we’ve studied very, very intensely,” Newman said.

“We have very good pictures of many different sorts so you don’t just see the detail of ground-based imaging.”