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Multiple antennas of the LWA-1 station of the Long Wavelength Array in central New Mexico, photographed at sunset. Each antenna stands about 1.5 meters (5 feet) high and about 2.7 meters (9 feet) across the base
An innovative new radio telescope array under construction in central New Mexico will eventually harness the power of more than 13,000 antennas and provide a fresh eye to the sky. The antennas, which resemble droopy ceiling fans, form the Long Wavelength Array, designed to survey the sky from horizon to horizon over a wide range of frequencies.
The University of New Mexico leads the project, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., provides the advanced digital electronic systems, which represent a major component of the observatory.
The first station in the Long Wavelength Array, with 256 antennas, is scheduled to start surveying the sky by this summer. When complete, the Long Wavelength Array will consist of 53 stations, with a total of 13,000 antennas strategically placed in an area nearly 400 kilometers (248 miles) in diameter. The antennas will provide sensitive, high-resolution images of a region of the sky hundreds of times larger than the full moon. These images could reveal radio waves coming from planets outside our solar system, and thus would turn out to be a new way to detect these worlds. In addition to planets, the telescope will pick up a host of other cosmic phenomena.
"We'll be looking for the occasional celestial flash," said Joseph Lazio, a radio astronomer at JPL. "These flashes can be anything from explosions on surfaces of nearby stars, deaths of distant stars, exploding black holes, or even perhaps transmissions by other civilizations." JPL scientists are working with multi-institutional teams to explore this new area of astronomy. Lazio is lead author of an article reporting scientific results from the Long Wavelength Demonstrator Array, a precursor to the new array, in the December 2010 issue of Astronomical Journal.
The new Long Wavelength Array will operate in the radio-frequency range of 20 to 80 megahertz, corresponding to wavelengths of 15 meters to 3.8 meters (49.2 feet to 12.5 feet). These frequencies represent one of the last and most poorly explored regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.
In recent years, a few factors have triggered revived interest in radio astronomy at these frequencies. The cost and technology required to build these low-frequency antennas has improved significantly. Also, advances in computing have made the demands of image processing more attainable. The combination of cost-effective hardware and technology gives scientists the ability to return to these wavelengths and obtain a much better view of the universe.
The predecessor Long Wavelength Demonstrator Array was also in New Mexico. It was successful in identifying radio flashes, but all of them came from non-astronomy targets -- either the sun, or meteors reflecting TV signals high in Earth's atmosphere. Nonetheless, its findings indicate how future searches using the Long Wavelength Array technology might lead to new discoveries.
Radio astronomy was born at frequencies below 100 megahertz and developed from there. The discoveries and innovations at this frequency range helped pave the way for modern astronomy. Perhaps one of the most important contributions made in radio astronomy was by a young graduate student at New Hall (since renamed Murray Edwards College) of the University of Cambridge, U.K. Jocelyn Bell discovered the first hints of radio pulsars in 1967, a finding that was later awarded a Nobel Prize. Pulsars are neutron stars that beam radio waves in a manner similar to a lighthouse beacon.
Long before Bell's discovery, astronomers believed that neutron stars, remnants of certain types of supernova explosions, might exist. At the time, however, the prediction was that these cosmic objects would be far too faint to be detected. When Bell went looking for something else, she stumbled upon neutron stars that were in fact pulsing with radio waves -- the pulsars. Today about 2,000 pulsars are known, but within the past decade, a number of discoveries have hinted that the radio sky might be far more dynamic than suggested by just pulsars.
"Because nature is more clever than we are, it's quite possible that we will discover something we haven't thought of," said Lazio.
More information on the Long Wavelength Array is online at: http://lwa.unm.edu .
The Long Wavelength Array project is led by the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, N.M., and includes the Los Alamos National Laboratory, N.M., the United States Naval Research Laboratories, Washington, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. The California Institute of Technology manages JPL for NASA.
Major automakers shut down plants in six Midwestern states and Ontario, and were just a fraction of the commerce that felt the storm's wrath.
Grain and livestock movement were also paralyzed in many areas. Wheat prices rose on worries that extreme cold that will follow the storm could damage crops. Citrus growers in south Texas also feared extensive damage from a hard freeze.
The storm, touching some 30 states and a third of the U.S. population, stretched from New Mexico to Maine as it moved toward the northeast where an ice storm wreaked havoc on New York City's morning commuters.
Chicago was set to get its biggest snowfall in more than 40 years. Some 20 inches of snow was forecast to pile up by late Wednesday. Snowfalls of a foot or more were recorded from Oklahoma City to Kansas City and Indianapolis.
The website flightaware.com, which tracks airline cancellation information, said more than 5,200 flights had been canceled in the United States so far Wednesday. That followed thousands of flight cancellations Tuesday.
"We're totally out of Chicago today; 920 cancellations in and out," said American Airlines spokesman Tim Smith. Power was out for more than 375,000 customers from Texas to New England, and into Canada.
Treacherous ice, rather than deep snow, hit New York City. The heavily used commuter rail service between New Jersey and New York was suspended due to ice buildup on the overhead power lines, authorities said. Public transportation in other major cities, including Boston, was also disrupted.
But Wall Street trading was not impacted by the storm as exchanges opened on time and many traders worked from home. Equities trading volume through midday was in line with an average to slightly below-average day.
The huge two-day storm delivered its strongest punch to the Midwest, dumping as much as three inches of snow an hour on Chicago during most of the night along with winds of up to 40 miles per hour.
CBOT's open-outcry trade opening was delayed by 30 minutes from the normal time of 9:30 a.m. (1530 GMT), but Globex electronic trading opened on time at 9:30 a.m., said Chris Grams, of the world's largest futures exchange, the CME Group in Chicago.
Chicago's two major airports canceled a combined 2,000 flights, the city's Department of Aviation said.
Among the storm-affected businesses, large and small, Abbott Laboratories, a major pharmaceutical company, closed its headquarters north of Chicago Wednesday.
Major interstate highways in the Plains and Midwest were closed and a state of emergency was declared across the area.
Major railroads, including Burlington Northern Santa Fe and Norfolk Southern, which transport commodities across the United States, said snow and ice was slowing them down.
The discovery, published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, is mystifying astronomers for the time being and illustrates just how much variety is possible in the universe.
The team at NASA and a range of universities has named the system Kepler-11, after the orbiting Kepler space telescope that spotted it.
"One of the most striking features about the Kepler-11 system is how close the orbits of the planets are to one another," they wrote in their report.
The star resembles Earth's own sun. But five of the planets orbiting it are packed into a space equivalent to the distance between Mercury and Venus in our own solar system.
And they are bigger and puffier than the rocky inner planets of our solar system, Earth, Venus, Mars and Mercury, the scientists said. However, they are some of the smallest exoplanets -- planets outside our solar system -- ever seen.
"They are much more closely packed ... than any other planetary systems known, including our own," said Jack Lissauer, a scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California.
"It is clear that such planets need not resemble the Earth in any way," Jonathan Fortney of the University of California, Santa Cruz, added in a telephone briefing.
"The low-mass planets in the Kepler-11 system appear to be more like small Neptunes than giant Earths." Neptune, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus are the giant gassy planets on the outer reaches of our solar system.
Astronomers have now found more than 500 exoplanets. Most are giant, because they are so far away that only the biggest are detectable. But researchers are certain there are Earthlike planets out there.
Fortney believes Kepler can eventually find them, if the telescope designed to find Earth-like planets orbiting other stars can orbit Earth long enough to collect the data.
"If it goes past its three-year mission -- six, eight, 10 years -- then we might get enough data," he said.
No telescope is powerful enough to directly visualize a planet orbiting another star. Instead, scientists use indirect means to find them.
Kepler measures the light coming from a star. A planet passing in front of the star as it orbits will dim this light just slightly. The researchers can them compute the planet's size and how quickly it is orbiting from this information.
In this case, the flickering light suggests a system of at least six planets, spinning rapidly around the star. One is orbiting farther out that the other five but they all appear to be made mostly of gas and orbiting in a very flat, circular plane.
