By Deborah Halber, News Office

The combination of optimized scheduling and a highly efficient, instantly
accessible camera designed and constructed by MIT is allowing the twin
Magellan telescopes at Chile’s Las Campanas Observatory to pursue science
programs not possible or practical elsewhere.

Now that one of the two powerful new telescopes is operational, MIT
involvement in the project is ramping up — including that of undergraduate
and graduate students — and results are starting to come in.

The clear, dark skies of the Chilean Andes, which provide a southern-
hemisphere view of the center of our galaxy and our nearest neighboring
galaxies, allow studies deemed impossible a few years ago.

Such studies include optical follow-up of gamma ray burst sources, monitoring
light from gravitationally lensed quasars, occultations (light blockages)
of stars by solar system bodies, high-precision photometry of microlensing
events in the Magellanic clouds, physical studies of recently discovered
near-Earth asteroids, optical follow-up of supernovae in distant galaxies
and exploration of the Kuiper Belt of small bodies orbiting the sun beyond
Neptune.

The Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington (OCIW), which
operates the site, is the lead partner in the project. MIT is a 10 percent
partner; other partners include Harvard at 20 percent and the Universities
of Michigan and Arizona at 10 percent each.

Each partner in the Magellan project has its own scientific agenda for the
new telescopes. The project is providing direct training in astronomical
instrumentation for MIT students from the undergraduate through the post-
doctoral level, said James L. Elliot, professor of physics and of earth,
atmospheric and planetary sciences (EAPS) and director of the Wallace
Astrophysical Observatory.

One MIT undergraduate and five graduate students are working on data
generated by Magellan. More will be added as additional data come back,
Professor Elliot said. When the two telescopes are functional by 2003, MIT
is expected to be allotted 65 nights a year.

CAPITALIZING ON MagIC

One of the twin 50-foot-high, 150-ton telescopes saw its first stars in July
2000. MIT’s first run occurred March 22-25, with the next scheduled for June
11-14.

The powerful telescopes, which have 22-foot diameter mirrors that are a
radical departure from the conventional solid-glass mirrors used in the
past, are honeycombed on the inside and made out of Pyrex glass that is
melted, molded and spun into shape in a specially designed rotating oven.
The massive mirrors are so heavy that gravity bends them out of shape. The
MIT team has come up with a method to check on the mirror and realign it
when necessary.

“Other telescopes do this intermittently. We do it all the time,” Professor
Elliot said. “This increases the efficiency of our work.”

Users of the telescopes “see fantastic conditions maintained through the
night. Everyone who has gone down there says they have never seen anything
like this,” said Paul L. Schechter, the William A.M. Burden Professor of
Astrophysics at MIT and a member of the Magellan research team.

MIT staff from the EAPS and physics departments, as well as from the Center
for Space Research, developed and built MagIC (Magellan Instant Camera),
one of the main instruments on the telescopes. MagIC allows regular
observations on a wide variety of time scales and permits rapid response
to time-critical or transient phenomena such as the identification of
gamma-ray burst sources. Professor Elliot is principal investigator
for MagIC, which was built in collaboration with Harvard’s Center for
Astrophysics.

Thanks to MagIC, the observatory is able to establish a flexible scheduling
system, unlike most observatories that assign telescope time only in full
night allocations.

In particular, programs that call for uniform, frequent measurements of
relatively short duration are a unique capability that can be capitalized
on by MagIC on Magellan.

Programs now in progress or planned by MIT astronomers and their Magellan
partners to take advantage of MagIC include:

* Optical follow-up of gamma ray burst sources. Since the first gamma ray
burst (GRB) was spotted 25 years ago, GRBs have remained one of the most
studied and least understood phenomena in modern astronomy. MagIC — with
its instant accessibility and monitoring capability — is being used to
optically identify sources immediately after burst and for longer-term
photometric monitoring of the source light curve.

The High Energy Transient Explorer II project, led by senior research
scientist George Ricker, is expected to provide detection of around 30
GRBs per year, with their positions known to unprecedented accuracy.

Magellan’s large aperture and the expected excellent image quality may
permit identification and longer term monitoring of GRBs too faint for
cameras on smaller telescopes.

* Monitoring the light curves of gravitationally lensed quasars. Multiple
images of a distant quasar — produced by the gravitational lensing of an
intervening galaxy — have long held the promise of giving direct distances
to cosmological objects, but have only recently begun to deliver on that
promise. Underlying the method is that the light paths associated with the
multiple images have different lengths and therefore different light travel
times. Because all relevant angles are known, a difference in path lengths
is as good as a path length.

The challenge, then, is to measure the difference in travel times. Most
telescopes have only one instrument accessible at any given time, and it is
difficult if not impossible to get observations on a regular basis with the
same instrument and setup. Also, telescopes tend to be scheduled night by
night, in part because instrument changes are time-consuming. Magellan is
expected to provide better images than traditional setups.

Professor Schechter is one member of the research team, which included
physics graduate student Josh Winn and his research advisor, Professor
Jacqueline Hewitt, reporting Magellan’s first results: the discovery of
a double radio source that is probably a two-image gravitational lens.

An optical spectrum of the bright component — the object PMN J1632-0033 —
was obtained with the first Magellan telescope. It could be a binary quasar,
the small separation and similarity of radio continuum spectra of the
components suggest that they are lensed images of a single quasar.

* Stellar occultations by solar system bodies. Stellar occultations
(blockages, as in an eclipse) can probe ring systems and atmospheres in the
outer solar system with spatial resolutions of a few kilometers — about a
thousand times better than the resolution of any other Earth-based method.

Stellar occultation data can be used to establish the structure of
atmospheres and rings of solar system bodies at high spatial resolution.

MagIC on Magellan has the capability for recording CCD subframes at high
speed, which is essential for occultation observations. Magellan’s flexible
scheduling will allow occultation observations to be scheduled on short
notice (or when MIT schedule blocks do not cover the time of the occultation).

Major goals in these areas are to extend the kinematic ring models for Uranus
and Saturn, to study asymmetry in particle size distributions in “clumpy”
rings such as Saturn’s F ring and Uranus’s lambda ring, and to continue
investigating the upper atmospheres of Uranus, Jupiter, Titan and Saturn.

* Physical studies of near-Earth objects (NEOs). There are several successful
survey programs regularly discovering a growing number of near-Earth objects,
such as the LINEAR program at MIT’s Lincoln Labs. These programs discover
new objects but they don’t provide any additional physical information about
them. The difficulty with NEOs is that they are usually discovered when very
close to the Earth and at their brightest, but are moving swiftly away and
getting progressively fainter.

The combination of large aperture and responsive scheduling will enable
MagIC to help carry out a systematic photometric study of NEOs as they
are discovered. It is particularly important to identify composition for
potentially Earth-threatening NEOs, since high-density nickel-iron bodies
pose the greatest danger.

* Kuiper Belt objects and centaurs. The Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune contains
around 70,000 objects larger than 100 km in diameter. Kuiper Belt objects
are well-preserved fossil remnants from the planetary formation epoch.
Studying this region and its objects may shed light on the origin and
evolution of outer solar system bodies.

Fewer than 100 Kuiper Belt objects are known, and much more observational
work is needed to understand their dynamical and physical properties.MagIC
is ideal for documenting additional Kuiper Belt objects because recovery
observations must be accomplished soon after the discoveries or the objects
will be lost.

* Supernovae studies. Type 1a supernovae are finally proving their
usefulness as standard “candles” at cosmological distances. MagIC, with
its instant accessibility over relatively long windows of time and the
large aperture of Magellan, is ideal for such measurements.

* Massive compact halo objects. Gravitational lensing occurs when objects
such as clusters of galaxies distort the light coming from a particular
source such as a star. A massive compact halo object (MACHOs) could act as
a gravitational lens by focusing the light from a source, making it seem
brighter for a while. MACHOs, which could be very dim stars, are candidates
for the dark matter that researchers are seeking.

Observations of the gravitational lensing of stars in our own galaxy and in
the Magellanic clouds have produced exciting and provocative results. The
most straightforward interpretation, but also the most controversial, is
that perhaps 50 percent of the galaxy’s dark halo consists of objects with
about half the mass of our sun.

IMAGE CAPTION: [http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/tt/2001/may16/magic.html]
Graduate student Susan Kern (left) and Erica McEvoy, a sophomore in physics,
discuss data obtained from the Magellan telescope. Photo by Donna Coveney.