The VLT’s Laser Guide Star: A laser beam launched from VLT’s 8.2-meter Yepun telescope crosses the majestic southern sky and creates a man-made star at 90 km altitude within the excessive Earth’s mesosphere. The Laser Guide Star (LGS) is a part of the VLT’s Adaptive Optics system and it’s used as a reference to right photographs from the blurring impact of the ambiance. Credit: ESO / G. Hüdepohl
New analysis reveals how international warming impacts astronomy.
The readability of the ambiance above the location from the place the observations are taken has a fragile relationship with the standard of the ground-based astronomical observations. Therefore, areas for telescopes are chosen with nice care. They are sometimes excessive above sea stage, so there’s much less ambiance between them and their targets. Since clouds and even water vapor make it tough to see the evening sky clearly, many telescopes are additionally constructed within the desert.
Caroline Haslebacher, lead writer of the research. Credit: Caroline Haslebacher
In a research introduced on the Europlanet Science Congress 2022 in Granada, a gaggle of researchers led by the University of Bern and the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) PlanetS reveal how one of many biggest issues of our time, anthropogenic local weather change, is now even affecting our view of the cosmos. The research was not too long ago printed within the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
A blind spot within the choice course of
“Even though telescopes usually have a lifetime of several decades, site selection processes only consider the atmospheric conditions over a short timeframe. Usually over the past five years – too short to capture long-term trends, let alone future changes caused by global warming”, Caroline Haslebacher, lead writer of the research and researcher on the NCCR PlanetS on the University of Bern, points out.
Therefore, the group of scientists from the University of Bern and the NCCR PlanetS, ETH Zurich, the European Southern Observatory (ESO), and the University of Reading in the UK decided to demonstrate the long-term perspective.
Worsening conditions around the globe
Their analysis of future climate trends, based on high-resolution global climate models, shows that major astronomical observatories from Hawaii to the Canary Islands, Chile, Mexico, South Africa, and Australia will likely experience an increase in temperature and atmospheric water content by 2050. This, in turn, could mean a loss in observing time as well as a loss of quality in the observations.
“Nowadays, astronomical observatories are designed to work under the current site conditions and only have a few possibilities for adaptation. Potential consequences of the climatic conditions for telescopes, therefore, include a higher risk of condensation due to an increased dew point or malfunctioning cooling systems, which can lead to more air turbulence in the telescope dome”, Haslebacher says.
The fact that the effects of climate change on observatories had not been taken into account before was not an oversight, as study co-author Marie-Estelle Demory says, but was not least due to the state of the art: “This is the first time that such a study has been possible. Thanks to the higher resolution of the global climate models developed through the Horizon 2020 PRIMAVERA project, we were able to examine the conditions at various locations of the globe with great fidelity – something that we were unable to do with conventional models. These models are valuable tools for the work we do at the Wyss Academy”, says the senior scientist at the University of Bern and member of the Wyss Academy for Nature.
“This now allows us to say with certainty that anthropogenic climate change must be taken into account in the site selection for next-generation telescopes, and in the construction and maintenance of astronomical facilities,” says Haslebacher.
Reference: “Impact of climate change on site characteristics of eight major astronomical observatories using high-resolution global climate projections until 2050” by C. Haslebacher, M.-E. Demory, B.-O. Demory, M. Sarazin and P. L. Vidale, 2 August 2022, Astronomy and Astrophysics.
DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202142493
