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CONSORTIUM,
INCLUDING HAVERFORD PROFESSORS, RECEIVES GRANT TO CONSTRUCT NEW
TELESCOPE
A multi-university consortium of astronomy professors,
which counts among its members Haverford’s Stephen Boughn
and Bruce Partridge, has been awarded $10 million by the National
Science Foundation to construct the Atacama Cosmology Telescope
(ACT), a state-of-the-art instrument that will be located in the
desert of Cerro Toco, Chile. The telescope will be used for measuring
the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), leftover heat radiation from
the Big Bang.
ACT makes use of state-of-the-art detectors and amplifiers being
designed and built in part by a recent Haverford graduate, Randy
Doriese (formerly Dorwart) ‘96, now working at the National
Institute of Standards and Technology in Colorado.
The ACT will be built on a high, dry plateau with an altitude of
16,000 feet; its mid-latitude location will allow for observation
of 60 percent of the sky. “It’s one of the best places
on earth for this kind of telescope,” says Partridge, who
explains that high, dry conditions are ideal when performing short
wavelength radio astronomy. “Water vapor gets in the way of
signals from distant galaxies or the early universe, so you need
to be as high as possible to avoid it.”
When the telescope is ready for use in either late fall or early
winter of 2006, it will be able to measure the CMB with better resolution
and sensitivity than any existing telescope has achieved. “We
want the detail to be as fine as if it were viewed with the human
eye,” says Partridge. “Because it’s a ground-based
instrument, we can build it bigger—the bigger it is, the finer
the detail will be.” These results will be beneficial to Partridge’s
research concerning fluctuations in the intensity of the CMB.
The consortium responsible for the ACT’s construction—which
includes professors from Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania,
Rutgers, and Columbia—was formed with the goal of creating
high-precision, high-resolution images of the CMB. Boughn and Partridge
helped draft the proposal to NSF.
“We were interested not only in the construction of the telescope
and the science it will yield, but in the possibilities for Haverford
students,” says Partridge, who points out that several Haverford
students will be involved in projects related to the ACT’s
science. One student, Sarah Burke ‘06, will spend this summer
assisting professor Mark Devlin at Penn, another consortium member,
with his measurement of temperature fluctuations in the CMB.
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