4am Ramblings

It's 4am and I've finally finished all the damn HTML coding and I've only got 3 hours until I have to run to the summit to put some liquid helium into a tank...... talk about bitch-work. Anyways, the new timelapse are up on my website.

Since I don't really have any experience with radio observations, I thought I'd do a little writeup on the CSO.

This is what it looks like. It's a 10.4 meter piece of tin foil...... Since radio waves have millimeter to meter size wavelengths, the 'mirror' doesn't have to be much smoother than sub-millimeter. You can do fun things like write on the face of the 'mirrors' and not screw it up too much....



You might recognize this - the horsehead nebula. It's in the belt of orion. Orion and Taurus (the directions pointing towards them) have some of the more active and studied star formation regions. they're full of molecular clouds, or 'crap-clouds'. if you took this stuff and compressed it to atmospheric pressure, it would be dirtier than a 1950's smokestack. It's full of interesting crap like carbonates, amino acids, silicates, deuterated molecules, blah blah whatever. by the way, this was taken "in the visible" meaning that this is red to blue electromagnetic radiation (.4 to .7 micrometer or .0004mm)
ok, so this is an 'image' of the same thing (yes it's sideways) in the 'radio'. The funny notation of 12 CO J=3-2 means that it's the Carbon 12 isotope of carbonmonoxide that is emitting light in the 3-2 rotational transition (J means angular momentum ie rotation) which is a 1 mm size wave. Notice that the dark part in the visible is the bright part in the radio. The carbon-monoxide is "glowing" although it is nowhere near "hot". It temperature is near 10K (-260 Celcius). These clouds contain molecules (like CO, CO2, H2O, HDO, D20, and more messy stuff) that emit light in the radio (I know it sounds weird but I want to drive home the point that light is radiation regardless of what you use to 'see' it).


Just for fun, here's a map of the sky in the radio taken by COBE in space. The top image is the 'raw' data. The red-blue asymmetry is from our motion through space - we're falling in all sorts of directions and that results in a slight redshift of the light away from our direction-of-fall. Once you subtract out this "dipole", you see the milky way in the middle panel. It's pretty bright from all the molecular clouds emitting light. Then you subtract that away as best you can, and you're left with the Cosmic Microwave Background. The 2.7K relic from the big bang, one of the two only observations in support of it (the other being galaxies are all moving away from us).