What if we could look at the origins of our own solar system, the place we live in?
Well, it seems like we are already doing so: technology has taken us to our distant past.
The Caltech High-speed Multi-color Camera, CHIMERA, has been helping the scientists from Caltech studying the beginnings of our own Solar System.
Well, it seems like we are already doing so: technology has taken us to our distant past.
The Caltech High-speed Multi-color Camera, CHIMERA, has been helping the scientists from Caltech studying the beginnings of our own Solar System.
Located at the Hale Telescope, on the Paloma Observatory, near San Diego, California, this equipment is allowing astronomers to observe objects from the Kuiper Belt;the icy bodies past Neptune ( including Pluto). The camera is also able to detect near - Earth asteroids even if they are less than 10 meters long and stars in very weird forms.
The belt gathers the remnants of the formation of our solar system . Studying its components would help us trace our origins and even speculating about our future.
The wide-field telescope camera system monitors thousands of stars at the same time, ready to, by capturing 40 frames per second, notice the movement of any Kuiper Belt object in front of a star, which lasts only about one tenth of a second.
One particular interest of the research is detecting bodies less than 0.6 miles long, which have very rarely been seen, so scientists want to observe them to have a sense of their frequency and nature.
According to Gregg Hallinan, principal investigator at Caltech, "What makes CHIMERA unique is that it does high-speed, wide-field, multicolor imaging from the ground, and can be used for a wide variety of scientific purposes," Hallinan said. "It's the most sensitive instrument of its kind."
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