Category Archives: Astronomy

Video: The Colossus telescope and the search for exoplanets with advanced tech civilizations

This SETI Institute talk combines two amazing developments of our day – the discovery of exoplanets and the development of giant telescopes. Jeff Kuhn of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii gives an excellent presentation (suitable for a wide audience) about The Colossus Project: Designing an optical/IR instrument to detect life outside the solar system:

This talk describes an effort to detect life, and even conduct a planetary census, in our cosmic neighborhood. I’ll describe some results from the Colossus group, an interdisciplinary science and engineering team, working to show how telescopes much larger than the TMT or EELT could be built today by relaxing some of the astronomical requirements of current “world’s largest telescope” projects.

So where exactly is Voyager 1 with respect to the Solar System?

A reader points to this discussion of where the Voyager 1 spacecraft is with respect to our solar system, the heliosphere , the Oort cloud, and interstellar space, a topic on which recent reports may have left some people confused:  What’s the deal with Voyager 1? – The Maddow Blog

Has Voyager 1 left the solar system? from The Rachel Maddow Show on Vimeo.

 This plot is particularly helpful:

This artist's concept shows NASA's Voyager spacecraft against a backdrop of stars.
You Are Here, Voyager: This artist’s concept puts huge solar system distances in
perspective. The scale bar is measured in astronomical units (AU), with each set
distance
beyond 1 AU representing 10 times the previous distance. Each AU is equal to
the 
distance from the sun to the Earth. It took from 1977 to 2013 for Voyager 1 to reach
the edge of interstellar space. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

 

Earth from space, pre-space travel