Astronomers typically deal with the very, very big: large telescopes, gigantic galaxies, and massive exploding stars.
But one of the more revolutionary astronomical instruments of the decade is a mini satellite the size of a breadbox.
The satellite will act as an artificial star that astronomers can observe from the ground, allowing them to more accurately measure the brightness of a space object and better understand some of the greatest mysteries in our universe, such as dark energy.
NASA recently approved the $19.5 million Landolt Space Mission to launch the mini-satellite into orbit.
“This is really great science that NASA supports,” 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 CubeSat, is designed to orbit the Earth at a distance of 36,236 miles. At that distance, its speed will match the Earth’s rotation, so the satellite will appear fixed in the night sky and will be an easy target for telescopes to track.
You won’t be able to see it with the naked eye. But to telescopes it looks like a star. The mission is expected to launch in 2029. It will be the first instrument of its kind.
“It’s really new for us to have some sort of artificial quote-unquote 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 know exactly how much light it emits.
The CubeSat, named Landolt after the late astronomer Arlo Landolt, will fire lasers with a specific number of light particles, or photons, that astronomers can use to calibrate their telescopes to measure light.
This can help eliminate much of the guesswork that astronomers now do when using real stars to calibrate their instruments.
The problem is that there’s no way to know exactly how much light real stars emit because we can’t send a probe to them to accurately measure their brightness, Richey-Yowell said. In addition, Earth’s atmosphere absorbs a lot of light from space, which can also affect astronomers’ calibrations.
“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 and how much light is coming out of this CubeSat per second,” then we can use it to compare and more accurately measure the light from other objects, such as real objects. stars, she said.
The mission is expected to help astronomers measure the light emitted by stars 10 times more accurately than current estimates, LiveScience reported.
It’s like getting a 1,000-piece puzzle that only has half the number of pieces, and then someone gives you a few hundred more pieces as a gift. Landolt will help astronomers capture small details that they would otherwise have missed in the data.
How Landolt could revolutionize astronomy
“Our entire astronomy is based on light, and so we really need to know how much light we are actually receiving,” 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 must be to keep 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 key characteristics astrobiologists look for when exploring potential planets that could harbor life.
Finding more Earth-like planets is just the beginning. Astronomers can also use Landolt to measure light from distant exploding stars, called supernovas, which 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 result in one value, while others result in a slightly different value. This riddle could be the key to unraveling some of the universe’s greatest mysteries, like understanding the invisible force tearing our universe apart called dark energy.
“So absolutely everything from small, tiny planets to the entire scale of the universe depends on our understanding of stars and how bright they are and what kind of light they emit,” Richey-Yowell said. “I really think it will be revolutionary for astronomy.”
This article was originally published by Business Insider.
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