1.
La Silla Observatory
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La Silla Observatory is an astronomical observatory in Chile with three telescopes built and operated by the European Southern Observatory. Several other telescopes are located at the site and are maintained by ESO. The observatory is one of the largest in the Southern Hemisphere and was the first in Chile to be used by ESO. The La Silla telescopes and instruments are located 150 km northeast of La Serena at the outskirts of the Chilean Atacama Desert, following the decision in 1963 to approve Chile as the site for the ESO observatory, scouting parties were sent to various locations to assess their suitability. The site that was decided upon was La Silla in the part of the Atacama desert,600 km north of Santiago de Chile. Besides being government property, it had the benefits of being in a dry, flat and easily accessible area, yet isolated and remote from any artificial light. Originally named the Cinchado, it was renamed La Silla after its saddle-like shape, on October 30,1964, the contracts were signed and an area of 245 square miles was purchased the following year. During 1965, temporary facilities were erected with living quarters, a workshop, the dedication ceremony of the road to the top took place in March 1966, two months after its completion. On 25 March 1969, the ESO site at La Silla was finally inaugurated by President Eduardo Frei Montalva. With a permanent base of dormitories, workshops, hotels and several functioning telescopes, the observatory was fully operational. The ESO1. 5-metre and ESO 1-metre telescopes had been erected in the late 1960s and these three telescopes can be seen in this order from right to left in the background of the adjunct image from June 1968. By 1976, the largest telescope planned, the § ESO3.6 m Telescope and it was subsequently to have a 1. 4m CAT attached. In 1984, the 2. 2m telescope began operations, while in March 1989, a 1-metre telescope owned by Marseille Observatory opened in 1998, followed by a 1. 2-metre telescope from Geneva Observatory in 2000. ESO operates three major optical and near infrared telescopes at the La Silla site, the New Technology Telescope, the 3. 6-m ESO Telescope, and these telescopes are not operated by ESO and hence do not fall under the responsibility of La Silla Science Operations. The telescope hosts HARPS, the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher, HARPS is a spectrograph with unrivalled precision and is the most successful finder of low-mass exoplanets to date. Since April 2008, HARPS is the instrument available at the 3.6 m telescope. The ESO New Technology Telescope is an Alt-Az,3. 58-metre Richey-Chretien telescope which pioneered the use of active optics, the telescope and its enclosure had a revolutionary design for optimal image quality. NTT saw first light in March 1989, the telescope chamber is ventilated by a system of flaps which optimize the air flow across the NTT minimizing the dome and mirror seeing
2.
Asteroid belt
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The asteroid belt is the circumstellar disc in the Solar System located roughly between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter. It is occupied by numerous irregularly shaped bodies called asteroids or minor planets, the asteroid belt is also termed the main asteroid belt or main belt to distinguish it from other asteroid populations in the Solar System such as near-Earth asteroids and trojan asteroids. About half the mass of the belt is contained in the four largest asteroids, Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, the total mass of the asteroid belt is approximately 4% that of the Moon, or 22% that of Pluto, and roughly twice that of Plutos moon Charon. Ceres, the belts only dwarf planet, is about 950 km in diameter, whereas Vesta, Pallas. The remaining bodies range down to the size of a dust particle, the asteroid material is so thinly distributed that numerous unmanned spacecraft have traversed it without incident. Nonetheless, collisions between large asteroids do occur, and these can form a family whose members have similar orbital characteristics. Individual asteroids within the belt are categorized by their spectra. The asteroid belt formed from the solar nebula as a group of planetesimals. Planetesimals are the precursors of the protoplanets. Between Mars and Jupiter, however, gravitational perturbations from Jupiter imbued the protoplanets with too much energy for them to accrete into a planet. Collisions became too violent, and instead of fusing together, the planetesimals, as a result,99. 9% of the asteroid belts original mass was lost in the first 100 million years of the Solar Systems history. Some fragments eventually found their way into the inner Solar System, Asteroid orbits continue to be appreciably perturbed whenever their period of revolution about the Sun forms an orbital resonance with Jupiter. At these orbital distances, a Kirkwood gap occurs as they are swept into other orbits. Classes of small Solar System bodies in other regions are the objects, the centaurs, the Kuiper belt objects, the scattered disc objects, the sednoids. On 22 January 2014, ESA scientists reported the detection, for the first definitive time, of water vapor on Ceres, the detection was made by using the far-infrared abilities of the Herschel Space Observatory. The finding was unexpected because comets, not asteroids, are considered to sprout jets. According to one of the scientists, The lines are becoming more and more blurred between comets and asteroids. This pattern, now known as the Titius–Bode law, predicted the semi-major axes of the six planets of the provided one allowed for a gap between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter
3.
Asteroid
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Asteroids are minor planets, especially those of the inner Solar System. The larger ones have also been called planetoids and these terms have historically been applied to any astronomical object orbiting the Sun that did not show the disc of a planet and was not observed to have the characteristics of an active comet. As minor planets in the outer Solar System were discovered and found to have volatile-based surfaces that resemble those of comets, in this article, the term asteroid refers to the minor planets of the inner Solar System including those co-orbital with Jupiter. There are millions of asteroids, many thought to be the remnants of planetesimals. The large majority of known asteroids orbit in the belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, or are co-orbital with Jupiter. However, other orbital families exist with significant populations, including the near-Earth objects, individual asteroids are classified by their characteristic spectra, with the majority falling into three main groups, C-type, M-type, and S-type. These were named after and are identified with carbon-rich, metallic. The size of asteroids varies greatly, some reaching as much as 1000 km across, asteroids are differentiated from comets and meteoroids. In the case of comets, the difference is one of composition, while asteroids are composed of mineral and rock, comets are composed of dust. In addition, asteroids formed closer to the sun, preventing the development of the aforementioned cometary ice, the difference between asteroids and meteoroids is mainly one of size, meteoroids have a diameter of less than one meter, whereas asteroids have a diameter of greater than one meter. Finally, meteoroids can be composed of either cometary or asteroidal materials, only one asteroid,4 Vesta, which has a relatively reflective surface, is normally visible to the naked eye, and this only in very dark skies when it is favorably positioned. Rarely, small asteroids passing close to Earth may be visible to the eye for a short time. As of March 2016, the Minor Planet Center had data on more than 1.3 million objects in the inner and outer Solar System, the United Nations declared June 30 as International Asteroid Day to educate the public about asteroids. The date of International Asteroid Day commemorates the anniversary of the Tunguska asteroid impact over Siberia, the first asteroid to be discovered, Ceres, was found in 1801 by Giuseppe Piazzi, and was originally considered to be a new planet. In the early half of the nineteenth century, the terms asteroid. Asteroid discovery methods have improved over the past two centuries. This task required that hand-drawn sky charts be prepared for all stars in the band down to an agreed-upon limit of faintness. On subsequent nights, the sky would be charted again and any moving object would, hopefully, the expected motion of the missing planet was about 30 seconds of arc per hour, readily discernible by observers
4.
Spitzer Space Telescope
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The Spitzer Space Telescope, formerly the Space Infrared Telescope Facility, is an infrared space telescope launched in 2003. It is the fourth and final of the NASA Great Observatories program, the planned mission period was to be 2.5 years with a pre-launch expectation that the mission could extend to five or slightly more years until the onboard liquid helium supply was exhausted. This occurred on 15 May 2009, without liquid helium to cool the telescope to the very low temperatures needed to operate, most of the instruments are no longer usable. All Spitzer data, from both the primary and warm phases, are archived at the Infrared Science Archive, in keeping with NASA tradition, the telescope was renamed after its successful demonstration of operation, on 18 December 2003. Unlike most telescopes that are named after famous deceased astronomers by a board of scientists, the contest led to the telescope being named in honor of astronomer Lyman Spitzer, who had promoted the concept of space telescopes in the 1940s. Spitzer wrote a 1946 report for RAND Corporation describing the advantages of an extraterrestrial observatory, the US$720 million Spitzer was launched on 25 August 2003 at 05,35,39 UTC from Cape Canaveral SLC-17B aboard a Delta II 7920H rocket. It follows a heliocentric instead of orbit, trailing and drifting away from Earths orbit at approximately 0.1 astronomical unit per year. The primary mirror is 85 centimeters in diameter, f/12, made of beryllium and was cooled to 5.5 K, by the early 1970s, astronomers began to consider the possibility of placing an infrared telescope above the obscuring effects of Earths atmosphere. Anticipating the major results from an upcoming Explorer satellite and from the Shuttle mission, long-duration spaceflights of infrared telescopes cooled to cryogenic temperatures. Earlier infrared observations had been made by both space-based and ground-based observatories, ground-based observatories have the drawback that at infrared wavelengths or frequencies, both the Earths atmosphere and the telescope itself will radiate strongly. Additionally, the atmosphere is opaque at most infrared wavelengths and this necessitates lengthy exposure times and greatly decreases the ability to detect faint objects. It could be compared to trying to observe the stars at noon, previous space observatories were launched during the 1980s and 1990s and great advances in astronomical technology have been made since then. Most of the early concepts envisioned repeated flights aboard the NASA Space Shuttle and this approach was developed in an era when the Shuttle program was expected to support weekly flights of up to 30 days duration. A May 1983 NASA proposal described SIRTF as a Shuttle-attached mission, several flights were anticipated with a probable transition into a more extended mode of operation, possibly in association with a future space platform or space station. SIRTF would be a 1-meter class, cryogenically cooled, multi-user facility consisting of a telescope, the first flight was expected to occur about 1990, with the succeeding flights anticipated beginning approximately one year later. By September 1983 NASA was considering the possibility of a long duration SIRTF mission, Spitzer is the only one of the Great Observatories not launched by the Space Shuttle, as was originally intended. However, after the 1986 Challenger disaster, the Centaur LH2–LOX upper stage, the mission underwent a series of redesigns during the 1990s, primarily due to budget considerations. This resulted in a smaller but still fully capable mission that could use the smaller Delta II expendable launch vehicle
5.
Hour
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An hour is a unit of time conventionally reckoned as 1⁄24 of a day and scientifically reckoned as 3, 599–3,601 seconds, depending on conditions. The seasonal, temporal, or unequal hour was established in the ancient Near East as 1⁄12 of the night or daytime, such hours varied by season, latitude, and weather. It was subsequently divided into 60 minutes, each of 60 seconds, the modern English word hour is a development of the Anglo-Norman houre and Middle English ure, first attested in the 13th century. It displaced the Old English tide and stound, the Anglo-Norman term was a borrowing of Old French ure, a variant of ore, which derived from Latin hōra and Greek hṓrā. Like Old English tīd and stund, hṓrā was originally a word for any span of time, including seasons. Its Proto-Indo-European root has been reconstructed as *yeh₁-, making hour distantly cognate with year, the time of day is typically expressed in English in terms of hours. Whole hours on a 12-hour clock are expressed using the contracted phrase oclock, Hours on a 24-hour clock are expressed as hundred or hundred hours. Fifteen and thirty minutes past the hour is expressed as a quarter past or after and half past, respectively, fifteen minutes before the hour may be expressed as a quarter to, of, till, or before the hour. Sumerian and Babylonian hours divided the day and night into 24 equal hours, the ancient Egyptians began dividing the night into wnwt at some time before the compilation of the Dynasty V Pyramid Texts in the 24th century BC. By 2150 BC, diagrams of stars inside Egyptian coffin lids—variously known as diagonal calendars or star clocks—attest that there were exactly 12 of these. The coffin diagrams show that the Egyptians took note of the risings of 36 stars or constellations. Each night, the rising of eleven of these decans were noted, the original decans used by the Egyptians would have fallen noticeably out of their proper places over a span of several centuries. By the time of Amenhotep III, the priests at Karnak were using water clocks to determine the hours and these were filled to the brim at sunset and the hour determined by comparing the water level against one of its twelve gauges, one for each month of the year. During the New Kingdom, another system of decans was used, the later division of the day into 12 hours was accomplished by sundials marked with ten equal divisions. The morning and evening periods when the failed to note time were observed as the first and last hours. The Egyptian hours were closely connected both with the priesthood of the gods and with their divine services, by the New Kingdom, each hour was conceived as a specific region of the sky or underworld through which Ras solar bark travelled. Protective deities were assigned to each and were used as the names of the hours, as the protectors and resurrectors of the sun, the goddesses of the night hours were considered to hold power over all lifespans and thus became part of Egyptian funerary rituals. The Egyptian for astronomer, used as a synonym for priest, was wnwty, the earliest forms of wnwt include one or three stars, with the later solar hours including the determinative hieroglyph for sun
6.
Comet
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A comet is an icy small Solar System body that, when passing close to the Sun, warms and begins to evolve gasses, a process called outgassing. This produces an atmosphere or coma, and sometimes also a tail. These phenomena are due to the effects of radiation and the solar wind acting upon the nucleus of the comet. Comet nuclei range from a few hundred metres to tens of kilometres across and are composed of collections of ice, dust. The coma may be up to 15 times the Earths diameter, if sufficiently bright, a comet may be seen from the Earth without the aid of a telescope and may subtend an arc of 30° across the sky. Comets have been observed and recorded since ancient times by many cultures, Comets usually have highly eccentric elliptical orbits, and they have a wide range of orbital periods, ranging from several years to potentially several millions of years. Short-period comets originate in the Kuiper belt or its associated scattered disc, long-period comets are thought to originate in the Oort cloud, a spherical cloud of icy bodies extending from outside the Kuiper belt to halfway to the nearest star. Long-period comets are set in motion towards the Sun from the Oort cloud by gravitational perturbations caused by passing stars, hyperbolic comets may pass once through the inner Solar System before being flung to interstellar space. The appearance of a comet is called an apparition, Comets are distinguished from asteroids by the presence of an extended, gravitationally unbound atmosphere surrounding their central nucleus. This atmosphere has parts termed the coma and the tail, however, extinct comets that have passed close to the Sun many times have lost nearly all of their volatile ices and dust and may come to resemble small asteroids. Asteroids are thought to have a different origin from comets, having formed inside the orbit of Jupiter rather than in the outer Solar System, the discovery of main-belt comets and active centaur minor planets has blurred the distinction between asteroids and comets. As of November 2014 there are 5,253 known comets, however, this represents only a tiny fraction of the total potential comet population, as the reservoir of comet-like bodies in the outer Solar System is estimated to be one trillion. Roughly one comet per year is visible to the eye, though many of those are faint. Particularly bright examples are called Great Comets, the word comet derives from the Old English cometa from the Latin comēta or comētēs. That, in turn, is a latinisation of the Greek κομήτης, Κομήτης was derived from κομᾶν, which was itself derived from κόμη and was used to mean the tail of a comet. The astronomical symbol for comets is ☄, consisting of a disc with three hairlike extensions. The solid, core structure of a comet is known as the nucleus, cometary nuclei are composed of an amalgamation of rock, dust, water ice, and frozen gases such as carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane, and ammonia. As such, they are described as dirty snowballs after Fred Whipples model
. Bibcode:2009ApJ...694L.111H. doi:10.1088/0004-637X/694/2/L111. Retrieved 2010-12-17.
