Telescopes

This is sleepy. History. Sleepy History is a production of Slimber Studios. To listen ad-free, get access to bonus episodes, and support the ongoing production of this show, check out our premium feed. Väng firar 70 år av resor som är svåra att släppa taget om. Och det gör vi med massor av erbjudanden som är omöjliga att motstående. Boka redan nu på wing.se. De bästa resorna försvinner först. Ving- Semester. New Maybelline Serum Lipstick.

Tonight, we're going to explore and investigate. that's allowed human beings to peer. of the heavens, revealing parts of the universe that were invisible. This invention is the telescope. We'll trace its development from the earliest handheld instruments through the incredible James Webb Space Telescope, which now orbits the sun a million miles. There it gazed at the Recording far away galaxies.

and long ago light will also examine Telescopes have made possible, and the celestial secrets they've understood. So just relax and let your mind drift as we explore the sleepy three of Telescope. Under the darkened sky at nighttime. The vast blackness scattered with sparkling stars. The filmy strip of the Milky Way. falling across it. Our ancestors. sight long ago and wondered about those twinkling points of light. The view has changed. eons ago.

And it still has the same power to spark wonder in our hearts. As it has The dawn of time. The starscape can still evoke a feeling of curiosity, amazement, and From the earliest moments? Human history. Forebears to wonder. The stars. They could only watch, wait, and wonder at what they could see with their own eyes in the night sky. Today though That our ancestors could never. Imagine. Yet? Still have the are to induce a great sense of wonder. At the mystery. And magist. Of the cosmos.

This image captured not long ago with technology so futuristic. It can sound more like sick. actual fact. Though I assure you that it is It shows a dramatic spiral glowing, bluish-white, against a background of star-spangled black. Delicate strands and Clouds. Form the spiral's arms, swirling outward from a center of Robin's egg blue. The glowing spiral is a galaxy, a star. From far away. Its technical name is M C. But it's not a little bit The Phantom Galaxy. It's located.

We humans viewing from Earth. constellation. The Phantom Galaxy belongs to a category of spiral galaxies. That astronomers have named And design spirals. By this they mean that it's true. Is sharp and distinct, as compared to other spiral galaxies whose outlines are vaguer and more amorphous. And the grand design spirals is very grand indeed. Wisps of gas and dust. form a lattice pattern that looks as fragile as a spider's web. In the very center.

The spiral. There's no gas, revealing a clear view of a knot of stars around which the gas. Swirls. The image is splendid. speaking in its beauty. It was captured by the James West. Telescope. This huge telescope was launched On Christmas day. twenty twenty one, where it settled into orbit almost a million years. Quickly. began transmitting St. Images revealing previously of the universe. Reducing brilliance.

Telescope has produced the clearest images of and far off details of the heavens ever seen by human eyes. And Also recorded The clearest image.

Past. That's because on the scale of the universe, Space can always equal. Time. Takes time for the light from distance. ours to reach us here on earth. The farther away the star, the longer its light. If we look at our sun, we're actually seeing it as it was about eight minutes ago. That's how long it takes for the sun's light to reach our earth. The next nearest stars are much farther away than our sun. and their light. takes some four years to reach us.

So, when we look upon those stars, We're seeing them as they were four years ago. Yeah. We're actually looking at the night. Mostly much more. For example, let us turn our minds eyes towards the Orion constellation. The star pattern is most notable for a band of three distinct stars. form a line. To the ancient Greeks. This line marked the belt of a mythological hunter named Orion. Within this constellation, we encounter the Orion Nebula, whose light takes fifteen hundred years to reach us.

This means that when we look at the Right now, we are actually seeing how this nebula looked around. 500. As for the Phantom Galaxy, our glowing spiral from the Of this story. It is 32 million light years away. In other words, that web television. The galaxy as it was 32 million years ago. Long before humans walked the earth or gazed at the heavens or creating instruments. Examine the stars. Scientists are using the web telescope's phantom galaxy images.

As part of an effort to discover more about how stars formed during the early Days of the universe. The telescope's clearer observations will help them get a read on just how old the stars. Galaxies are not going to be able to do that. They can combine the web data with material gathered by others. Earthbound telescopes. Together, this information will of the universe than ever possible.

4. But the first inventors of the telescope weren't thinking about back in time. And they had no conception of how vast Ancient our universe. Instead, early telescope makers wanted Examine the visible sky in greater detail. They wanted to look closer at the objects they could already see at night. being our own moon and closest planetary neighbors. These remained great mysteries at that time. Meanwhile, the farther out planets of our solar system have been not even been discovered yet. Good eye.

Before history began, watching Stars and weaving. About them. These stories included myths that live on today in the names of constellations like. peace and Orion. More methodical observations. Stars too. They kept complex records and even formed accurate predictions. about celestial movements. Several hundred years ago, the advent of the telescope brought the cosmos into focus in a whole new way. Launching modern astronomy on a sky. trajectory quite literally. Here's how it began.

Around sixteen hundreds. Craftsmen in the Netherlands were making advances in creating eyeglasses to allow people to see better. They drew on knowledge about the science of optics that had been developing throughout the Middle Ages. Various colours. and innovators. advances in the area over the prior centuries. These included the Islamic scientists. Indy in the ninth century and it Ibn Al Haytham As well as the first time. Friar and scientist Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century.

Inventors in Europe began to use lenses. To magnify objects. and make them appear closer than they were. In sixteen oh eight, several different cities. Spectacle makers in the Netherlands created what were essentially. Telescopes. However, these were intended for earthbound use. something like a spotting scope or binoculars, not for observation. notion of the cosmos.

They were referred to as perspective glasses, and they magnified objects three times, making them look three times larger or closer than they looked normally. The fact that several different spectacle makers created these perspective glasses at the same time highlights the reality of that they were drawing on a significant amount of existing knowledge in the field. At the time, however, it The battles over who would get credit for the innovation and wealth. Spectacle makers in one town. Haunted.

Zipper A and Zacharias Jansen. Both developed prototypes, leading to some claims that the former stole the idea from the latter. Lipper Hay filed a patent for this. for seeing things far away as if they were near. A few weeks later, another lens maker from another part of the Netherlands, named Jacob Matius, applied for a very similar patent. The government of the Netherlands turned down both patent applications. Lipper hay a good deal of money to create binoculars using the technology.

The developers of these early telescopes. saw them as useful for observations on earth, such as for surveying land and conducting military surveillance. Certain pioneering astronomers, however, The value of these dungeons. perspective classes. For

revealing the heavens. Among them was the revolutionary scientist, Galileo Galilei, living in what is now the country of Italy. Galileo heard reports about the new active classes the year after the rival patent. filed in the Netherlands. He immediately came up with his own slightly different So that his telescope magnified objects to eight times their rather than just three. This was Necessary improvement. To be used to observe objects very far away, like in space.

By the end of that year, he created an instrument. That could make objects look twenty times larger than when they were viewed with die. Eventually, he would succeed. in creating a telescope. That could magnify thirty times. Galileo was reportedly. the first to point his telescope upwards. Gaze into the mysteries. And public. Is observation. The powerful new instrument allowed Galileo to publish new discoveries, like Jupiter's four largest moons and sunspots on the surface of. Our son.

Galileo demonstrated his telescope in Venice. to great success, and was rewarded with a lifetime position as a lecturer. Galileo's largest telescope had a lens just two inches wide, and even his instruments Which were so much more powerful than those made in the Netherlands were weak compared to incredible technology. With these rudimentary tools, he made groundbreaking observations. Telescopes, Galileo observed the Milky Way. Pale band of white that's visceral. The sky after the sun sets.

And with them he was able to Discern that this previously mysterious milky band was actually made up of many individual stars. It wasn't some kind of fog or celestial milk, galaxy. Galileo also turned his scopes on the moon, where he saw mountains and valleys. Thou knowest. mind of the fabled man in the moon. His documentation of the lunar landscape countered the common belief of the time. That the moon was a Oh, Galileo. Observe the planet Jupiter and discover its four largest moons as well.

which are invisible to human eyes without help. A rival astronomer, Simon Marius of Germany. Also spotted these moons around the same time, and he gave them the names by which they today. He named them Eo, Europa, Ganymede. And Callisto after characters from Greek. Roman mythology who were associated with with Jupiter, the king.

God. Following the trail blazing inventions Galileo, the Dutch spectacle makers, and their contemporaries, many other scientists continued developing new and better telescopes. They came up with ever more powerful ways to magnify. My celestial objects. Soon they were able to start observing phenomena in the outer reaches of the world. Solar system. and beyond. They created larger and stronger telescopes.

With these big More and more details in space that had formerly been invisible and unsuspected. They uncovered hitherto unknown planets circling our sun. Far away from the earth. For example, at the end of the 1700s, Astronomers found the distant planet Uranus. They observed this newly discovered. and carefully recorded its motion. In doing so, the scientists noticed that its orbit around the sun was irregular in ways they couldn't fully explain.

As they examined its odd orbit, however, They realized that it could be explained if there was an even more distant planet, as yet undiscovered, whose gravity was pulling on Uranus. And so, some of the scientists set to work, calculating where such An invisible planet might lie. In order to Gravitational. the effect they'd observed on Uranus' orbit. Their calculation Impressively accurate.

And sure enough, nineteen forty six, an astronomer in Berlin observed a brand new planet in just about the spot they'd calculated. The newly discovered planet was named Neptune. Far away to be seen from Earth without a telescope. Sun in the lonely outskirts. The solar system. We now know that it's an ice giant, a large planet made up of heavy elements surrounded by icy methane clouds. in faint and distant light. The sunniest time on Neptune. It's high noon.

Is only about as bright as the dimmest twilight on earth. It takes the remote planet one hundred sixty four years to orbit the sun, so a single twilight Neptune year. Fills the span of more than a century and a half here on Earth.

All this has been revealed by the observations made possible by telescopes. And The same year Neptune was discovered, another astronomer used a homemade telescope to spot the planet's largest moon. It would be more than one hundred years though before Neptune was are seen by human eyes. Over a century after a century. Discovery during the nineteen hundreds, astronomers used ever improved. Telescopes to spot. a second moon and a third one orbiting the ice giant.

Then, in 1989, An unmanned spacecraft called Voyager 2. Approached the planet. Beaming the image. Back to Earth. The Voyager mission went to the far ends of the solar system, observing distant planets and sending Human observers here at home. Scientists knew very little about Neptune. Before Voyager's observation. Because away. They learned a great about the planet. Including that it was a very important thing. Then even more moons were discovered. The Voyager mission.

And in 2009. Space Telescope took photos. eighteenth moon orbiting Neptune. Now? Close to two centuries after humans first laid eyes on the planet. The Ep Telescope has captured its own image of Neptune. that would surely have astounded and inspired those nineteenth century discoverers. In the Webb Telescope image, Neptune is a white globe that shines with Worldly brilliance. It appears translucent, like a delicate ice sculpture, or a Ball of frosted glass.

Filmy bands trace an elliptical route around the luminous. These are The image ethereal and hauntingly lovely. Astronomers say The clearest view. works I've ever had of Neptune's rings. The voyager too. Spacecraft. After them more than three years. In the image, the planet glows. The cool, shining white of an ice cave. Ordinarily, Neptune appears slightly blue in color, an effect of In its atmosphere. Detects light outside the visible light. Spectrum. Infrared light.

Naked eye. And at those wavelengths. The planet and its moon don't Instead, Methane gas absorbed. the kinds of light. Causing the planet to appear a nearly transparent white in the Here and there, though, bright spots and streaks shine on the otherwise translucent glow. These are The frigid planet's atmosphere reflects. among the sun's rays. The planet's filmy rings are dotted with tiny white moons. the web picture and another moon floats nearby.

Above Neptune, something shines like a Christmas star. Far outstripping the ghostly planet in brightness. Rays of light emerge from this shining body. Looking just like representation. Fabled star over Bethlehem. This is no star. It's Neptune's largest and most unusual moon, Triton. This moon's surface. is covered in ice. that we're used to. Instead, Triton is covered in frozen nitrogen. Triton's frozen surface reflects so much of the light. And it appears extremely bright.

That brightness originally led astronomers. Think Triton was much larger than the But the observations from Voyager 2 revealed. Smaller. Triton is unusual. backwards. impulse in the opposite direction. This backwards motion is known as a retrograde orbit. Triton is the only large moon in our solar system with with such a pattern. This odd orbit provides clues to how Triton evolved in the Earth. It makes scientists think that Triton formed on its own, away from gravity.

They speculate that it developed as a kind of baby planet that circled the sun by its First, far in the outer stretches of solar system. Under this hypothesis, Triton eventually encountered Neptune's gravity. Slowly pulls. Orbit around the ice giant. The process might have taken a billion years or more.

The haunting web telescope image of Triton possible by incredible advances in technology and engineering. These unfolded Steadily in the centuries since Galileo and his peers. pointed their telescopes skyward. To begin with, new inventions have enabled the telescope. to detect light and radiation far beyond. but visible to the human eye. This allows the web telescope to pick the website. Ancient light. That shows the formation of galaxies. and stars when the universe was young.

The dawn of space travel has also been To the evolution of telescopes. An evolution that has culminated for now in the deployment. instrument. Base travel is crucial to the advancement of telescope technology because Earth's atmosphere absorbs and distorts light. This something obscures our view of the universe. So, scientists realized that to see the universe without these distortions. They would need a telescope. Out beyond our atmosphere.

And thus, the Hubble Space Telescope was conceived. It wasn't the first telescope to go into space. There were light collecting instruments on missions from the dawn of the space age. Apollo sixteen astronauts even took a telescope called The far ultraviolet camera slash. Yeah. Back one hundred and seventy eight frames of film showing the universe as observed from beyond Earth's atmosphere. The Hubble telescope was, however, the first great space based telescope.

Astronauts on the Space Shuttle Discovery put the Hubble telescope into orbit. Yeah. It captures Of the universe that advanced scientific knowledge and understanding by leaps and bounds. The Hubble telescope. The first of next Observatories. These are several space telescopes that launched the era of space-based observations. Which in turn has been And more awe-inspiring insights into the universe. In 1991, NASA sent its second great observatory into space.

Gamma ray observatory, and it had four telescopes. as you might guess from the name, Yeah. Do you understand? Term gamma rays, we need to remember that the electromagnetic spectrum. Various forms of flight. X-rays, radio waves, and microwaves. Gamma rays are those at the highest energy part of the electromagnetic. Outside the range of visible light, and close in range to X-rays. Using the Compton Gamma Ray observation. Scientists detected gamma rays in space.

This enabled them to make various discoveries. creating a new category of galaxies. with supermassive black holes. The Compton Observatory was decommissioned in the year 2000, but meanwhile, NASA had put another great observatory into orbit. This was the Chandra X ray observatory, which was carried into space by the space shuttle Columbia in nineteen. Yeah. Chandra captures images of space. X-rays which are produced at very high temperatures, such as when stars explode.

or matter bends towards a black hole. The last of the so-called great observatories. The skies in two thousand three. It was Spitzer Space Telescope. It's a detected infrared light with the And which is on the other side of the world. from UV light, X-rays, and gamma rays. The Spitzer Telescope. But first to capture light from a planet beyond our earth. solar system. It also revealed a wispy ring of Saturn, plus the most distant galaxy. detected.

It was with the Spitzer telescope that observers found the first images of a star system with seven planets. Earth size called Trappist One. Other space telescopes followed. Yeah. including the cutting edge Kepler telescope. Yeah. Boasted a four foot. one inch mirror. The Kepler scope searched for other planets in our galaxy. Our solar system. These are known as exoplanets. Kepler searched for exoplanets that were too far away to observe directly. This using ingenious technique.

When distant planets pass in front of the stars they orbit, they cause a slight Death. Kepler det These dips in the light coming from stars in order to identify. NASA used the Kepler telescope to search work for Earth-sized planets. In what's nicknamed the Goldilocks. The area around us is We're a planet. Too hot and not too hot. From life as we know it on earth. In just six weeks, Kepler enabled the discovery of five exoplanets.

Which scientists named Kepler for B. And Not long ago, humans had had no evidence that planets existed. Anywhere in the universe, outside of our own solar system. Then, in a relatively short span of time, Telescope went on to reveal planets to be commonplace. All over the cosmos.

In addition to NASA, other space Into the business of sending telescopes. Into space too. In nineteen ninety-five. The European Space Agency collaborated with NASA on the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, a mouthful of a name that's known by its acronym, So how? The Soho spacecraft carries Instruments, including an ultraviolet imaging telescope for observing our sun. In 2001, Sweden, Canada, France. And Finland launched a forty three inch radio telescope aboard a called Odin.

The Italian Space Agency launched a craft with Amaray Imager in 2007. as well. In twenty thirteen, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launched another space telescope with a mouthful of a name. The extreme ultra-violent Spectroscope for exospheric. Dynamics. Also known as Hisaki Sprint Also in 2013, China put an ultraviolet telescope on the surface. Which is called descriptively the Lunar-Based Ultraviolet Telescope.

By 2014, The European space And NASA had reportedly launched more than ninety space telescopes, though only some of those were still.

And then, three decades. After the launch of the trailblazing Hubble telescope, Powerful web scope took to the heavens. It joined some twenty-eight other telescopes actively operating in space. Telescope is a science fiction. Like feat of ingenuity and engineering, designed to reveal the cosmos in a glory that. The ancient observers could Imagine. The telescope. Itself is built around a mirror that's more than twenty-one feet wide, a long way from Galileo's humble two-inch lens.

And the telescope is equipped the size of a tennis court to ward off the sun's rays. This is the Operates without the bearing. Atmosphere, unlike telescopes located on Earth. The web telescope is so large. That there was no rocket built. Intact. Instead It launched with its mirror and sun shield folded. Then they unfolded. Awe inspiring note. structure drifting through the near vacuum of open space.

majestically unfurling its antennas, its silvery mirror, its massive sun shield, Then the whole structure circling. Capturing light from far away. years ago, building the bank of human knowledge. Expanding the frontiers of as it slowly plums the mysteries.

Our magnificent universe. What will the coming years of observations bring? What new and Fresh knowledge. Going forward, what other inventions and technologies will carry human understanding? Now we can only ponder those questions as our ancestors pondered. their eyes over their heads. But one thing seems apparent. Potential no. as limitless as the universe. else.