• Question: Would you most want your telescope to capture a photo of e.g. a supernova

    Asked by Matthew to James on 14 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: James Gilbert

      James Gilbert answered on 14 Jun 2015:

      Actually a supernova would be the best thing! They’re very rare, and they’re incredibly useful for deciding how far away things are, because we think they always explode with the same brightness. If a star ‘goes supernova’, it’s really important to start observing it straight away, because they fade within days.

      I work on spectroscopic instruments, and they actually gather way more information than you could ever get from a photograph. Photos just capture the visible colour of something, but a spectrograph digs right into the detail of the electromagnetic spectrum, to the point where you can identify individual chemical elements glowing! You can still get a ‘picture’ this way, to print out and put in a frame if you really want, but at the moment it’s quite low in resolution (not many pixels). People are working on improving that though!

Comments

  • Photo: Freya

    Freya commented on :

    @James, @Matthew, I don’t do anything to do with stars and astrophysics, but I’ve always thought nebulae looked so beautiful! Is there anything particularly interesting about them though from a science point of view?