astronomy.com: As The Astronomy magazine found out, more than 100 of the Earth's largest research telescopes have been closed in recent weeks due to the COVID-19 pandemic. What began as a few reports of closings in February and early March has become an almost complete cessation of observational astronomy. And the closings are unlikely to end soon.
Observatory directors say they can be offline for three to six months - or even longer. In many cases, resuming operations will mean creating new ways of working during a pandemic. And this may not be possible for some instruments that require teams of technicians to maintain and operate. As a result, new astronomical discoveries are expected to be severely delayed.
“If everyone in the world stops observing, we have a data gap that we cannot fill or somehow repair,” says astronomer Stephen Janowiecki of the MacDonald Observatory in Texas. "This will be a period when we have no data in the astronomical community about what happened."
Yet these short-term losses are not the primary concern of astronomers. They are used to losing their telescope due to bad weather, and they are just as concerned about the risk of coronavirus to their loved ones as everyone else. However, all most astronomers can do right now is sit at home and wait for the storm to subside.
“If we now had our first bright supernova in hundreds of years, it would be terrible,” says astronomer John Mulchi, director of Carnegie Observatories. “But barring really rare events like this, most of the science will be done next year. The universe is 13.7 billion years old. We can wait a few months.
The outlook is darker when the long-term impact of the pandemic on astronomy is considered. Experts are already concerned that the continued damage to the global economy could derail plans for the next decade of cutting-edge astronomical research.
“Yes, the data will be lost within six months or so, but the economic impact may be more significant in the long term,” says Tony Beasley, director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. “It will be difficult to build new telescopes as millions of people will lose their jobs. I suspect the biggest impact will come from the financial nuclear winter we are about to get through."
Promotional video:
Editorial comment
Technically, we could retell this informational message in one paragraph of a mile, even in one sentence, however, we took the trouble to translate everything almost completely and literally, because between the lines there is a storehouse of information hidden - which we highlighted in text. What information is this?
Firstly, this is information that the observatories began to close in February, when the planet did not even believe in what was happening in Wuhan. And all because of the coronavirus?
Secondly, we, of course, could have written ourselves that an observatory is like a submarine in autonomous navigation - with a minimum of personnel and a maximum of food, but a clever academic uncle would say the same way. And my uncle said so. That is, my uncle said that the observatory is itself a quarantine facility and there is no need to introduce quarantine there.
Moreover: if the change of personnel at the observatory was, for example, in January of this year, then neither the coronavirus nor any other plague will get there. To delay their shift until September - and the entire planet will die out from a pandemic, and these guys will go out into the world and give rise to a new race of eggheads. But no - the observatories were first printed and then quarantined.
Thirdly, as the clever academician uncle says, they do not exclude a supernova explosion, the first candidate for which is Betelgeuse. Now there is 92% brightness there and all housewives in Mexico seem to have calmed down:
But their clever astronomer uncle says that they are still afraid to miss the explosion, that is, they do not exclude such. And we also do not rule out, since an increase in brightness by 60% in less than 50 days is a bit too much, it is more than 1% per day.
We will show what 1% per day is using the example of the orbit of Jupiter, which enters the stellar shell of Betelgeuse with its head:
Thus, from the edge to the center of the star will be somewhere under a billion kilometers, therefore, if the luminosity of the star increases by 1%, then the edge of the Betelgeuse gas cloud has moved inward / outward by the same 1%, that is, by 8,640,000 kilometers (we count very rough for ease of calculation). We divide this 86,400 seconds, which are in days, we get the expansion / collapse rate of Betelgeuse of the order of 1,000 km / sec.
In fact, there will be much more there, but the main thing here is to determine the order of magnitude. And order here is the maximum eruption rate of a solar prominence. That is, the speed of the prominence at the moment of ejection, then it drops sharply. And so the question arises: what makes the edge of Betelgeuse move so fast? It looks like either a collapse or an explosion, but not in any way a daily fluctuation in brightness.
Nevertheless, we will not dwell on Betelgeuse for now - for now it is important just to know that a supernova is still possible. The main question now, as we all understand, is another - the question WHY ALL ASTRONOMS HAVE GOT QUARANTINE ?! That is, they not only closed their access to toys, but also locked them in their apartments!
The only reasonable explanation for this worldwide quarantine is that something is flying towards Earth. Nibiru is flying, supernova particles are flying, a fleet of aliens is flying, which, taking out their chain axes, will rush to save us, an asteroid or a comet from cyanide is flying - until we definitely know. But, as the same The Astronomy writes, despite the closure of all major observatories, one of them continues to work. This is … an observatory at the South Pole, where a hefty infrared telescope was built by 2012. Apparently from there they follow the development of the event - so now we will also follow.