11/21/09 (About an hour and a half drive from Hilo) There we were, on top of Mauna Kea at 13,400 ft at
the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, listening to Tom Kerr, PhD who explained that
we were standing a few feet away from a spot in their telescope that was
actually the coldest place in the universe - - not just in Hawaii, not just in the
United States, not just on this planet, but YES, the coldest place in the whole
Universe!
That’s because…to see
other cold places IN the universe, the telescope has to be colder than what the
scientists are looking at – AMAZING!
To do that, they have to cool the spot/lens (?) on this powerful
telescope with a near perfect vacuum approaching
absolute zero degrees using a combination
of liquid helium & hydrogen – see photos under Maua Kea.
From Wikepedia, “Absolute
zero is the coldest temperature theoretically possible. It cannot be
reached by artificial or natural means, because it is impossible to decouple a
system fully from the rest of the universe. By international agreement, absolute zero is defined as
precisely 0 K on the Kelvin
scale, which is a thermodynamic
(absolute) temperature scale, and −273.15° on the Celsius scale.[1]
Absolute zero is also precisely equivalent to 0 R on the Rankine scale (same as
Kelvin but measured in Fahrenheit intervals), and −459.67° on the Fahrenheit scale.”
We also went over to UKIRT, the United Kingdom Infra-Red
Telescope at about 13,700 ft to watch the sunset & see the control room
where another “world-famous” UK scientist, Tim Naylor was collecting data
beside Jonathan who keeps all these monitors & equipment running. Big job - since apparently they have many
groups of scientists that are on a waiting list to be able to use one of the
(12?) phenomenal telescopes here - on top of Mauna Kea. There are so many research projects
going on at one time, that their main task is to constantly monitor the
mountain conditions & the conditions of the sky to determine which data set
they are going to collect! And in
order to even be in this room monitoring, the astronomers also have to acclimatize
at the 9,200 ft level in-between their 12-14 hr. night shifts.
Websites for additional info: www.ifa.hawaii.edu/info/vis, www.malamamaunakea.org,
A few fascinating facts about Mauna Kea: 1) the atmospheric
pressure on your body is roughly half of the pressure at sea level, 2) There is
40% the amount of oxygen there than at sea level, 3) wind speeds can exceed 100
miles per hour – so they put holes in their road signs to let the wind through,
4) icy roads can develop in less than 30 minutes so they monitor this closely
in case they need to go back down the mountain, 5) sections of the road have
steep grades of up to 15%– only 4-wheel drives are allowed on these often rough
roads without guardrails, 6) Mauna Kea, measured from its base at the floor of the Pacific, is 33,476 feet - the tallest mountain in the world!
Tom (Dr. Kerr) had us stay at the VIS, Visitor Information
Station at 9,000 ft, for 30 minutes before going up very slowly to the 14,000
ft level. I was fine, just a
little short of breath with any exertion for the first couple hours, but then I
could feel my heart speeding up, my head getting heavy with a progressive
headache. After about 15 minutes
of worsening symptoms, I knew I had to sit or lay down. It was beginning to hit others too, so
instead of our pre-planned soup & snack break, we headed back down the
mountain. Other than experiencing
tingling in my hands while descending, by the time we reached sea level, all altitude
sickness symptoms disappeared – YEAH!! I was told that my speech was slurred too!
We are so thankful to Dr. Kerr (his blog site: http://apacificview.blogspot.com)
who had graciously invited any interested people (from his blog site) to go
with him for a private tour. We
jumped at the chance to be guided by this famous scientist who was part of the
team that recently discovered the oldest & darkest-red starburst, also verified
by a Chilean observatory, to be 13.2 billion years old – the closest event to
the BIG BANG that has been discovered!
Thanks also to Tim & Jonathon who graciously let us see how they
worked & allowed us to warm up in their control room! Pretty exciting but makes us feel
pretty small! If the history of
the universe was compressed into a 24-hr day, the existence of humans only
happened seconds of the last hour!
