Since the enhancement of telescope by an Italian astronomer Galileo around four hundred years ago, astronomers are, in many people’s eyes, those staying with giant telescopes at night, recording changes of the myriad stars spangling in the sky and calculating various patterns of celestial bodies through observations. However, you may not know modern astronomers undergo their studies in some other ways which are free from nocturnal and regional restrictions. Astronomers even need not sit before a telescope to pry about the mysteries of the universe.

Sky Show “We are astronomers” introduces to the viewers the latest methods used by astronomers to explore the universe in our time. These include building the “Very Large Telescope” at a place 2,600 metres above sea level on the Paranal Mountain in Chile, South America to capture very clear pictures of the starry sky; scheduling to launch in 2014 the new “James Webb Space Telescope” by US to study the origin of galaxies through infrared observations; and constructing the world’s largest particle accelerator called “Large Hadron Collider” in Europe to “re-create” the Big Bang and the early conditions of the Universe after the creation. Besides, the large amount of data collected through detection with a variety of equipment by many countries require worldwide cooperation of astronomers, scientists, engineers and amateur star lovers for analysis. Therefore much more people including you and me may participate in and contribute to unveil the mystery of the universe.

You are an astronomer.

 
Credit: NSC Creative

James Webb Space Telescope (middle) is the largest and most complex one ever designed, which is scheduled to launch in 2014. This telescope has a sunshield that will unfold to the size of a tennis court while its eighteen separate mirrors for observation will transform into one giant mirror when required. It can observe objects up to one hundred times fainter than the level that the Hubble Space Telescope (right) can do.

Credit: NSC Creative

Located at a place on the Paranal Mountain that is 2,600 metres above sea level in Chile of South America, the “Very Large Telescope” consists of four separate giant telescopes each of which can collect one hundred thousand times more light than Galileo’s telescope did four hundred years ago.

Credit: NSC Creative

CERN built the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) 100 metres underground at the French/Swiss border. LHC is a 27-kilometre-long, super-cooled race track. Beams of atomic particles are accelerated around tubes until they approach close to the speed of light and then are forced to collide. Scientists believe that such collisions will reproduce the conditions present shortly after the universe came into existence.

Credit: NSC Creative

Interplanetary spacecrafts of many countries depend on the Deep Space Network to transmit data and maintain communications with the Earth. Every day, thousands of batches of data with quantity in gigabytes are being collected by both space and ground-based observatories.

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