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Schools Lecture 2009 – Wonderful telescopes
Institute of Physics
29 December 2008
In the 400 years since Galileo made his first observations of the night sky, telescope lenses just 2 inches wide have grown and transformed in to mirrors which are now eight metres across and astronomers can now look farther and farther into the Universe to answer man’s burning questions about the size, age and true nature of our Universe.
To mark the International Year of Astronomy (IYA), the Institute of Physics (IOP)’s 2009 Schools Lecture is to be given by astronomer Dr Andrew Newsam, a researcher at Liverpool John Moore’s University.
He will explain to school students, aged 14-16, across the country how telescopes have revealed the true age of the universe, 14,000 million years old, how we have predicted the Sun’s life expectancy, another 5,000 million years of sunlight, and how we know that there are 200,000 million stars in our galaxy.
As Dr Newsam explains, “Astronomy is different from the other sciences in that we can’t gather materials to assess them in the lab, we can only observe and it is our observations that allow us to surmise things about the true nature of our Universe.”
Today’s telescopes allow us to gather sharper images of more distant and smaller objects in space.
Dr Newsam continued, “Telescopes are allowing us to find amazingly small objects existing at great distances from Earth. Take neutron stars which are tiny but also fascinatingly dense – a neutron star the size of a matchbox has the same mass as the whole of the Earth. How do we know that?”
Telescopes also enable a form of time travel, allowing us to see the Universe as it was hundreds of millions of years in the past - looking at the Universe when it was significantly younger than it is now.
Telescopes have also developed to allow astronomers to explore the Universe through a range of different mediums – telescopes which search out radio waves, micro waves, infra red, ultraviolet, X-rays and gamma rays, along with, of course, visible light.
Dr Newsam’s lecture intends to inspire students into thinking more about how we know what we do know about our Universe and will engage students through fascinating facts and methods of observation along with some hands-on activities, giving students the opportunity to hunt for asteroids, identify planets orbiting distant stars and spot supernovae (massive exploding stars) in other galaxies.
Dr Newsam explained his enthusiasm for teaming up with the IOP for the 2009 Schools Lecture, “My work with schools grows from my view of science. Basically, if you aren’t communicating what you do, you aren’t doing science – the sharing of knowledge is integral to the whole thing.”
Image courtesy of The Liverpool Telescope Project
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