[BLANK_AUDIO]  And in the intervening 350 years, spectroscopy has

been possibly the key technique for Physics, for

Hi, one thing we can be sure of is that we know more Chemistry, and even for Biology. 
about the universe today than we did 500 years ago. 
It tells us about the structure of matter. 
So why is that? 
But it was the Victorians who first had 
Is it because there's been a series of brilliant
astronomers having brilliant ideas?  the idea of pointing a spectroscope at the stars. 

Well yes, partly it is that. But it's also because there's As was first done by William Huggins at Tulse Hill in
been a series of technological revolutions that London 
astronomy has benefited from.
and also by Alberto Secchi at the Vatican observatory,
Now, history is pretty complicated but we are going to in Italy. 
boil this down to six key steps. 
And what they saw was a revolution. 
[BLANK_AUDIO] 
By breaking up the light into its spectrum we 
Revolution number one, the invention of the
telescope.  were now able to tell what stars were made of,

Now to a sailor, the telescope is all about magnifying how hot they were, and even how fast they were
the image, making things look bigger.  moving. 

But to an astronomer, telescopes are all about catching It's really the point in history where astronomy
more light.  became 

So we want them to be big.  astrophysics and it's been a key technique ever since. 

Now the pupil of the eye is about 5 mm across.  But the sort of spectrographs we bolt onto the back of 

On the other hand if we take a pair of binoculars like telescopes now are very big and they're very tricky to
this, or a small telescope,that lens there is about 50 mm design. 
across, so it collects a 100 times more light. 
And that's something we'll be talking about in week
You can see things a hundred times fainter. six. 

On the other hand here this lovely teaching telescope [BLANK_AUDIO] 

that we have here at the university. 
So revolution number three, photography, another
The mirror of the telescope here is about 50 cm great Victorian invention. 
across, so that's another factor of a 100 in its light
gathering power.  Let's have a look at this photographic plate 

Now big professional telescopes can be anything from that I've got on the light table here. 
2 m to 10 m across and so they collect even more light
and right now the the world community is developing a Now photography did 
giant new telescope which will be 40 m across, which
with great imagination is called the extremely large two things for astronomy. 
telescope.
The first was it enabled us to get 
And so we can catch more and more light and see
fainter and fainter objects. an objective image to record an image permanently. 

This produces technological challenges however, So we didn't have to rely on some dodgy astronomer's
we'll be looking at those in week two.  sketch. 

[BLANK_AUDIO]  We could simply see, anybody could see what that 

Okay revolution number two, spectroscopy.  part the sky looked like by looking at the photograph. 

In the 17th century Isaac Newton first took light, put it So that's advantage number one. 
through a prism and split it up into it's component
colors, into a spectrum.  Advantage number two is that astronomers were able
to integrate, that is to keep 
So today we tend to do the same thing with diffraction
gratings rather than prisms, but it's the same basic exposing the plate adding up more and more light to
idea.  see fainter and fainter objects. 

And this plate goes pretty deep.

Now the human eye when we're receiving information Now what we refer to as light normally, visible light,
it  just happens to be 

feels like a continuous movie, but actually of course a small range of wavelengths that we can detect with
we're  the retina of our eye. 

integrating for 1 25th of a second, on the retina.  But there's a lot more out there. 

Pretty soon astronomers with, their glass plates were
keeping 
them bolted to the telescope and exposing them the
whole night.
Radio waves. 
Infrared, ultraviolet, x-rays, they're all light, 
but they have very different wave lengths. 

Now today we don't use photographic plates  Now if we're going to detect those 

anymore, but we use another solid state detector. different kinds of light with something other 

This is what we use most often.  than our eye we need completely 

It's a CCD.  different technologies for each of those wavelengths. 

This is pretty much the same as the detector in  So the story of the 20th century was one of. 

your phone camera, but it's considerably bigger and opening up wavelength windows and seeing the
also more efficient.  universe in a different way. 

So that's a CCD camera. In the ultraviolet and x-rays, and radio and so on. 

Now, astronomers now like to make even bigger And every time we opened up a new window, we 
cameras 
saw completely different objects and the universe
by putting lots of them together in a mosaic.  seemed very different. 

You can see that in this picture here of the PanSTARRS We discovered relativistic jets spinning neutron stars, 
camera in Hawaii. 
gas at millions of degrees - 
That's a gigapixel camera and covers a large amount of
sky in one go.  Something weird every time we tried something new. 

CCD is also very efficient.  [BLANK_AUDIO] 

They catch more of the light and so we can go deeper Revolution number five, space astronomy. 
and deeper. 
Arguably, since the 1960s, this is the thing that's made
We also have similar detectors that for example work more difference than 
at infrared wave lengths. 
anything else to our understanding of the universe - 
And this picture you're seeing here, this is 
the ability to launch things into space. 
the ultra deep survey made on the UKIRT telescope. 
So here's a picture of the Hubble 
That involved adding up data effectively exposing for
hundreds of nights.  space telescope being launched on the space shuttle. 

[BLANK_AUDIO]  And here is another picture of the 

Revolution number four, is a 20th century revolution.  Hubble space telescope in orbit taken from the space
shuttle. 
The revolution of multi-wavelength astronomy. 
So it makes an enormous difference. 
Now light, is an electromagnetic wave in space. 
But, it's very, very expensive. 
And the lengths of the waves can be very different. 
So why do it? 
They can be little tiny nanometer length 
For the same amount of money we could 
waves or they can be great big long, meter long waves. 
build a much bigger telescope on the ground. 
It covers a bit range. 
So why launch things into space?
It's because the atmosphere is our enemy.  Once they're numbers on a computer, we can do
anything. 
So the atmosphere does three very bad things which
annoy astronomers.  We can do calculations. 

The first thing is that it blocks some of the light.  We can play with it. 

Some particular wavelengths, for instance x-rays,  We can just do just whatever we want to. 

don't get through the atmosphere at all.  So that's when things really took off for computers.

So in order to do x-ray astronomy, we have  Now at the same time, as the observers were playing
with 
to launch rockets into space there's, there's no choice.
their detectors and computers, the theorists 
The second bad thing that the atmosphere does is to
distort  were going into computers, as well. 

the light as it comes down through the atmosphere, it They took extremely big computers and ran
wiggles about. calculations based on their theories 

And it blurs our images, so it means that our pictures of how they thought the universe should look if their
are not sharp.  theories were correct. 

And that's the biggest reason why the Hubble space  They simulated entire universes and they're still doing
that today. 
telescope was put into space, is to take sharper
pictures. And so a lot of astronomers do this.

The third thing is that the atmosphere glows.  This movie that you're looking at now is a simulation
of 
We're trying to see extremely faint things in astronomy
and when there's  the universe made by the Virgo Consortium and the
challenge is 
a background glare from the sky, it makes seeing faint
things extremely hard.  to try and compare that, to our observations in the real 

So, even though space astronomy is expensive it  universe to try and work out, if the theories are
correct.
pays dividends once we get things up there. 
So, the stage we're at now is trying to join together
We'll talk more about space astronomy  data sets, 

in week three.  including theoretical data sets, from across the whole
worldwide 
[BLANK_AUDIO] 
web and to turn them into one giant seamless whole. 
So, revolution number six is the one we're in right
now.  And that challenge is known as the virtual observatory. 

That's the computer revolution.  [BLANK_AUDIO]

So this started in the 1960s, but really started to take

off in the 1980s.

Now remember we talked about photographic plate 

here that enabled us to record images permanently. 

And the modern version of that is the CCD detector.

But the additional thing about the CCD is that it's

electronic. 

So when you take the electronic signal, and we

combine that 

with a computer, it means that we store the

information 

as numbers on a computer.