He pulls out a pair of protective glasses that must be worn and leads the way
behind a curtain of cheap black plastic.
A long room, the size and feel of two high school classrooms combined, is loaded
with equipment. Two engineers at the far end stare inside the open belly of
one of the most complicated telescopes ever designed. They're about to install
the final guts, a complex box of devices that will combine and focus light of
one fake star that's been gathered from two locations in the room.
To the left is a large workbench the size of two kitchen tables.
"Here is the pseudo star," Blackwood says, pointing to this workbench crowded
with optical devices, screwdrivers and other parts and tools, as if someone
had swiped the Hubble Space Telescope and reorganized its innards here.
"Now this looks funny," Blackwood says, "but my engineers tell me it works."
Somewhere in the middle of the clutter is something like a flashlight, he claims,
though it's not obvious which item is this light source.
You have to wonder why they didn't just hang a Maglite on the wall over there.
Blackwood explains:
"Starlight is very different from a flashlight. Think of light as a series
of waves. Waves with crests crashing on a beach. At different points on the
beach, different crests are hitting. Because a star is so far away, its light
would reach each component in an interferometer as a plane [instead of an arc
of a sphere]. Light from a flashlight in a room, however, would radiate outward
in a sphere."
An interferometer works by combining the peak from the same wave collected
at two different locations, then using the long distance between the two telescopes,
known as the baseline, to see incredibly small things at terribly long distances.
"And we just can't do that with a flashlight."
Next Page: Building on the cheap
advertisement
