Word: palomares
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...with a diameter of 1.8 meters (72 in.). Arrayed in a circle and directing their light on a common focus to produce a single image, they gather as much light as a traditional 4.5-meter (176-in.) instrument. Thus, the so-called Multiple-Mirror Telescope is exceeded only by Palomar's 5-meter (200-in.) mirror and the new Soviet 6-meter (240-in.) telescope...
...basic idea for multi-eyed monsters is not new. Even while they were building Palomar in the 1930s, astronomers realized that if they wanted still larger instruments they would need less expensive technologies. Yet many doubted that it would ever be possible to get several smaller mirrors to scan the heavens precisely in unison. Explains MMT's acting director, Neville Woolf: "The problem is comparable to getting six headstrong prima ballerinas to dance as if they were...
Incredible as it may seem, scientists are now postulating supergiant black holes as well, monsters with event horizons millions of miles across and formed from a mass equal to that of billions of suns. Observations with the big telescopes at California's Palomar and Arizona's Kitt Peak National observatories strongly support the likelihood that at least one such heavyweight exists in M87, a galaxy that appears to be spewing out a great jet of matter. Astronomers found that M87's center is ten times as bright as the rest of the galaxy, and is surrounded by stars orbiting...
...Miller, using the Lick Observatory's powerful 120-in. (3-meter) telescope near San Jose, Calif., has produced powerful new evidence to support the "distant" quasar argument. Expanding on earlier work at the Hale Observatories by Beverley Oke and James Gunn with the 200-in. (5-meter) Palomar telescope, he and two colleagues studied one of the so-called BL Lacertae objects, which until the late 1960s were thought to be ordinary variable stars, but now are known to resemble quasars...
Kowal's latest finding was based on photographs taken in mid-October through the Hale Observatories' 122-cm. (48-in.) Schmidt telescope atop California's Mount Palomar. A microscopic examination of photographic plates exposed on successive nights revealed a short, faint trail of light between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus; the object that made it appeared to be moving in relation to the stars that formed the background. Kowal promptly called Brian Marsden of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., for help in verifying his discovery. Marsden, who serves as a clearinghouse...