Tyler McKay | Assistant News Editor
Featured Image: Professor Allan Carswell stands with the new telescope. | Courtesy of Vanessa Thompson
York unveiled its new telescope yesterday in the Carswell Observatory. Media were invited to watch a presentation on the one-meter telescope, which is now the most powerful on a Canadian university campus. York is also in possession of a 40-centimeter and a 60-centimeter telescope as well.
However, the new telescope is a huge upgrade because it means less time searching the night sky and more time analyzing the data, thanks to the telescope’s pointing accuracy.
The purpose of this new telescope is to “be able to show the public what excites astronomers, looking at objects in the night sky, and to be able to have our students utilize an instrument that allows them unprecedented access to objects in the night sky with great clarity.”
Second-year students are the first to use this new technology.
The students who are currently using the telescope are looking for what are called “active galaxy nuclei.” At the centre of each galaxy is a supermassive blackhole. These blackholes can be either active or inactive.
The activity of the blackholes is measured by the amount of light that it is emitting. If 10 per cent or more of the light from the galaxy is coming from the centre, then the blackhole is considered to be active. If the light is measured at less than 10 per cent, then the blackhole is inactive.
“When we are imaging, we don’t want to actually take just one image. We take a variety of them. You’ll take maybe 10-20 of those images in varying filters,” says York student Sunna Withers.
“We have a red, green, and blue filter so we would repeat that process in all three of those, do all of your imaging and after that you’d do a bunch of image processing. You want to stack the images you have; combine them into one image and you produce a final image from which you can do some data analysis.”
This project was funded by both the Carswell Family Foundation and York, each donating $500,000 to build this telescope. Both parties are excited and passionate about bringing this technology to York for science and for the public to be able to learn.
“Of all of the advanced science that we have going in many fields now, astronomy is about the only one in which a total amateur can make a world-shaking discovery of a transient phenomenon because there’s all sorts of things going on in the universe,” says physics an astronomy professor Allan Carswell.
“Some of them only last for a flash and if you have people who are actively watching and know what things should look like, then all of a sudden, they see something’s not what it’s supposed to be. They can report that and, before you know it, all the telescopes in the world take a look.”
The telescope is open to the public Wednesday nights all year round and will officially open to the public tonight, October 2.
“Do keep your eyes on our website observatory.blog.yorku.ca. It tells you all about what we’ve been up to. It gives you a little bit of history, but more to the point, it gives you access to the Eventbrite ticketing system,” says Paul Delaney, observatory coordinator, and physics and astronomy professor.
“We’ve got all of October and November up and we’re about to put December up as well.”
