4. What is the story of the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope? Where is it located and why? What features of the telescope are most fascinating to you?
6. The article concludes:
Joining the Inouye telescope in this coronal detective work are NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, now orbiting the Sun, and the joint NASA-European Space Agency Solar Orbiter, scheduled to be launched next week, in what amounts to a new coordinated effort to investigate our old shining friend.
What questions about the sun would you like scientists to investigate? How might the answers to your questions affect and benefit our lives?
7. Mr. Overbye writes:
Seen from afar, stars are gentle twinkling harbingers of romance and of the mysterious secret order of the universe. Grist for campfire philosophizing and armchair astrobiology.
What do you think he means by his statement? What romance or mysteries do you think stars like our sun hold? How often do you gaze at the stars at night? What do you think or feel when you stare into glistening lights in the night’s sky?
Going Further
Choose one of the following activities:
1) Research an intriguing question about the sun.
Today’s featured article only scratches the surface of the surface of our sun (O.K., bad pun). Many other questions and mysteries remain:
What is our sun made of? When and how did it begin? What is the weather on the sun? Why do we get sunburns and suntans? Why shouldn’t you look at the sun — even during an eclipse? What are the sun’s rogue plasma waves and magnetic islands? And many more …
You might consider using your research as the basis for an entry to our informational writing contest that runs until March 3, 2020, in which we’re challenging students to write an explanation, in 500 words or less, about any STEM-related concept that will engage and enlighten readers.
2) Do you think the United States should invest more in the study of the cosmos?
In “Will the United States Lose the Universe?” Mr. Overbye writes that “for more than a century, American astronomers have held bragging rights as observers of the cosmos. But that dominance may soon slip away”:
The United States is about to lose the universe.
It wouldn’t be quite the same as, say, losing China to communism in the 1940s. No hostile ideologies or forces are involved. But much is at stake: American intellectual, technical and economic might, cultural pedigree and the cosmic bragging rights that have been our nation’s for the last century.
In 1917, the 100-inch Hooker telescope went into operation on Mount Wilson in California, and Edwin Hubble eventually used it to discover that the universe is expanding. Until very recently, the mightiest telescopes on Earth have been on American mountaintops like Palomar, Kitt Peak and Mauna Kea. They revealed the Big Bang, black holes and quasars.
But no more. In 2025 the European Southern Observatory, a multinational treaty organization akin to CERN but looking outward instead of inward, will invite the first light into a telescope that will dwarf all others. The European Extremely Large Telescope on Cerro Paranal in Chile will have a primary light-gathering mirror 39 meters in diameter, making it 13 times more powerful than any telescope now working and more sharp-eyed than the iconic Hubble Space Telescope.
There are two American-led telescope projects that could compete with the European giant, if they are ever built: the Thirty Meter Telescope, slated for construction on Mauna Kea, in Hawaii, and the Giant Magellan on Cerro Las Campanas, in Chile. But both are mired in financial difficulties and political controversies, and their completion, if it happens, is at least a decade away.
The article concludes:
Now, as the wheels of the academic and government bureaucracy begin to turn, many American astronomers worry that they are following in the footsteps of their physicist colleagues. In 1993, Congress canceled the Superconducting Super Collider, and the United States ceded the exploration of inner space to Europe and CERN, which built the Large Hadron Collider, about 17 miles around, where the long-sought Higgs boson was eventually discovered.
The United States no longer builds particle accelerators. There could come a day, soon, when Americans no longer build giant telescopes. That would be a crushing disappointment to a handful of curious humans stuck on Earth, thirsting for cosmic grandeur. In outer space, nobody can hear you cry.
What do you think? Is the United States in danger of losing its supremacy in the study of the universe? What will be lost if we do? Should the United States invest more money in the building of large-scale telescopes?
3) Should telescopes be built on sacred land?
In “The Thirty Meter Telescope Can Show Us the Universe. But at What Cost?” John Edward Huth, a professor of physics at Harvard, writes:
On the Big Island of Hawaii, Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano, rises nearly 14,000 feet above sea level. There are currently 13 telescopes on its slopes, on land managed by the University of Hawaii. Mauna Kea is ideal for astronomy: It is dry, has little turbulent air and a large fraction of clear viewing nights. But Native Hawaiians have long voiced concerns over the construction of telescopes on Mauna Kea. To them, the mountain is sacred.
For the last four years, construction on a 14th telescope, the $1.4 billion Thirty Meter Telescope, has been delayed by legal challenges. The Hawaiian Supreme Court upheld the construction permit in October 2018. Just before construction was scheduled to start in July, protesters blocked Mauna Kea’s main access road. Thirty-eight arrests followed. On Wednesday the Board of Regents of the University of Hawaii is scheduled to consider a resolution to settle the standoff.
The protests are a culmination of a long period of disregard of indigenous claims to the mountain. The dispute also underscores the disconnect between Western science and the remarkable achievements of Polynesian astronomy, which enabled navigation across the vast Pacific to connect with tiny islands — mere specks, really — thousands of miles away. Polynesian people had been navigating this way for centuries, well before Magellan circumnavigated the globe in the 1500s with the aid of a compass.
The Thirty Meter Telescope would provide a powerful new window into the universe and be the first of its size and capacity in the Northern Hemisphere, giving astronomers access to now-hidden reaches of the sky.
With the ability to image atmospheres on exoplanets, perhaps we’ll discover evidence of extraterrestrial life. The telescope would also be able to capture images of the formation of galaxies in the early universe.
But at what cost? The continued neglect of Native Hawaiian culture in favor of Western scientific supremacy is simply not worth it. That’s why the best plan forward — for both indigenous science and Western science — is to locate the Thirty Meter Telescope elsewhere.
Do you agree? Should the plan to build the Thirty Meter Telescope on sacred lands be scrapped? Or is it more important to gather valuable information about the secrets of the universe?
