Interview with Stefan Söldner-Rembold, DUNE’s co-spokesperson

South Pole Telescope contributes to historic observations of supermassive black hole at heart of distant galaxy

Below is a press release from the University of Chicago announcing an exciting new result from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), an array of radio telescopes located around the world. Included in that array is the South Pole Telescope (SPT), which is operated by a collaboration of more than 80 scientists and engineers from a group of universities and U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories, including three institutions in the Chicago area.

These research organizations — the University of Chicago and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory — worked together to build a new, ultrasensitive camera for the telescope, called SPT-3G, which contains 16,000 superconducting detectors. Exploiting the technical capability and expertise of its Silicon Detector Facility, Fermilab led the assembly of the detector modules and their integration into the SPT-3G camera, which was designed by Bradford Benson of Fermilab and the University of Chicago. On EHT, Fermilab scientists helped to design the EHT receiver interface and installation on the SPT and have supported EHT observations through their leading roles on SPT-3G survey and SPT telescope operations. Fermilab’s work on the South Pole Telescope is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science.

The Event Horizon Telescope — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration — was designed to capture images of a black hole. On April 10, in coordinated news conferences across the globe, researchers revealed that they have succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow.

This breakthrough was announced April 10 in a series of six papers published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The image reveals the black hole at the center of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole sits 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the sun.

The EHT links telescopes around the globe, including the University of Chicago-run South Pole Telescope, to form an unprecedented Earth-sized “virtual telescope” with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution. The EHT is the result of years of international collaboration, and offers scientists a new way to study the most extreme objects in the universe predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

“We have taken the first picture of a black hole — a one-way door out of our universe,” said EHT project director Sheperd S. Doeleman of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. “This is an extraordinary scientific feat accomplished by a team of more than 200 researchers.”

Black holes are extraordinary cosmic objects with enormous masses but extremely compact sizes. The presence of these objects affects their environment in extreme ways, warping space-time and superheating any surrounding material.

“If immersed in a bright region, like a disc of glowing gas, we expect a black hole to create a dark region similar to a shadow — something predicted by Einstein’s general relativity that we’ve never seen before,” explained chair of the EHT Science Council Heino Falcke of Radboud University in the Netherlands. “This shadow, caused by the gravitational bending and capture of light by the event horizon, reveals a lot about the nature of these fascinating objects and has allowed us to measure the enormous mass of M87’s black hole.”

Multiple calibration and imaging methods have revealed a ring-like structure with a dark central region — the black hole’s shadow — that persisted over multiple independent EHT observations.

The EHT observations use a technique called very-long-baseline interferometry, which synchronizes eight telescope facilities around the world and exploits the rotation of our planet to form one huge, Earth-size telescope observing at a wavelength of 1.3 millimeters. This technique allows the EHT to achieve an angular resolution of 20 microarcseconds—enough to read a newspaper in New York from a sidewalk cafe in Paris.

One of these telescopes was the South Pole Telescope, one of the most sensitive instruments in the world built to search for the oldest light in the universe. Operated by an international collaboration led by the University of Chicago, the South Pole Telescope helped calibrate the data from all telescopes and is key to expanding the EHT’s reach around the globe.

“The South Pole Telescope’s location at the southernmost point of the Earth makes it an important component of the global EHT network,” said John Carlstrom, who directs the telescope. “Although M87 is not visible from the South Pole, it is a crucial player in observing other black holes, such as the massive one at the center of our own galaxy.”

Creating the EHT was a formidable challenge that required upgrading and connecting a worldwide network of eight pre-existing telescopes deployed at a variety of challenging high-altitude sites. These locations included volcanoes in Hawaii and Mexico, mountains in Arizona and the Spanish Sierra Nevada, the Chilean Atacama Desert, and Antarctica.

Besides the South Pole Telescope, the other contributing telescopes were ALMA, APEX, the IRAM 30-meter telescope, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano, the Submillimeter Array, and the Submillimeter Telescope. Petabytes of raw data from the telescopes were combined by highly specialized supercomputers hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and MIT Haystack Observatory.

“Once we were sure we had imaged the shadow, we could compare our observations to extensive computer models that include the physics of warped space, superheated matter and strong magnetic fields. Many of the features of the observed image match our theoretical understanding surprisingly well,” said Paul T.P. Ho, EHT board member and director of the East Asian Observatory. “This makes us confident about the interpretation of our observations, including our estimation of the black hole’s mass.”

The construction of the EHT and the observations represent the culmination of decades of observational, technical and theoretical work. Thirteen partner institutions worked together to create the EHT, using both pre-existing infrastructure and support from a variety of agencies. Key funding was provided by the National Science Foundation, the EU’s European Research Council and funding agencies in East Asia.

“We have achieved something presumed to be impossible just a generation ago,” Doeleman concluded. “Breakthroughs in technology, connections between the world’s best radio observatories, and innovative algorithms all came together to open an entirely new window on black holes and the event horizon.”

The South Pole Telescope collaboration is led by the University of Chicago and includes research groups at over a dozen institutions — including the UChicago-affiliated Argonne National Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Specialized EHT instrumentation was provided by the University of Arizona. The participation of the South Pole Telescope in the EHT is funded primarily by the National Science Foundation. 

Fermilab is America’s premier national laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research. A U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science laboratory, Fermilab is located near Chicago, Illinois, and operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance LLC, a joint partnership between the University of Chicago and the Universities Research Association Inc. Visit Fermilab’s website at www.fnal.gov and follow us on Twitter at @Fermilab.

DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering. NSF funds reach all 50 states through grants to nearly 2,000 colleges, universities and other institutions. Each year, NSF receives more than 50,000 competitive proposals for funding and makes about 12,000 new funding awards.

 

On Feb. 26, a crowd of engineers, technicians and analysts crowded around a computer screen as Fermilab scientist Deborah Harris pressed “stop” on the data collection for the MINERvA neutrino experiment.

“We’re all just really excited by what we’ve accomplished,” said Harris, MINERvA co-spokesperson and future professor at York University. “The detector worked wonderfully, we collected the data we need, and we did it on schedule.”

MINERvA studies how neutrinos and their antimatter twins, antineutrinos, interact with the nuclei of different atoms. Scientists use that data to help discover the best models of these interactions. Now, after nine years of operation, the data taking has come to an end, but the analysis will continue for a while. MINERvA scientists have published more than 30 scientific papers so far, with more to come. As of today, 58 students have obtained their master’s or Ph.D. degrees doing research with this experiment.

Neutrinos could hold the answer to one of the most pressing mysteries in physics: why matter was not completely annihilated by antimatter after the Big Bang. That imbalance from 13.7 billion years ago led the universe to develop into what we see today. Studying neutrinos (and antineutrinos) could uncover the mystery and help us understand why we are here at all.

A number of neutrino experiments investigate this mystery, including Fermilab’s NOvA experiment and the upcoming international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by Fermilab. To be as successful as possible, these experiments need precise models that describe what happens before and after a neutrino collides with an atom.

Every time a neutrino collides with part of an atom inside a detector, a spray of new particles flies off and travels through the rest of the detector. In order to understand the nuances of neutrinos, scientists need to know the energy of the neutrino when it first enters the detector and the energy of all the particles produced after the interaction. This task is complicated by the fact that some of the outgoing particles are invisible to the detector — and must still be accounted for.

Imagine you’re playing pool and you shoot the cue ball at another ball. You can easily predict where that second ball will go. That prediction, however, gets much more complex when your cue ball strikes a collection of balls. After the break shot, they scatter in all directions, and it’s hard to predict where each will go. The same thing is true when a neutrino interacts with a lone particle: You can easily predict where the lone ball will go. But when a neutrino interacts with an atom’s nucleus — a collection of protons and neutrons — the calculation is much more difficult because, like the pool balls, particles may go off in many different directions.

“It’s actually worse than that,” said Kevin McFarland, former MINERvA co-spokesperson and professor of physics at the University of Rochester. “All the balls in the break shot are also connected by springs.”

MINERvA provides a neutrino-nucleus interaction guidebook for neutrino researchers. The experiment measured neutrino interactions with polystyrene, carbon, iron, lead, water and helium. Without MINERvA’s findings, researchers at other experiments would have a much tougher time understanding the outcomes of these interactions and how to interpret their data.

“I really am proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish so far,” said Laura Fields, Fermilab scientist and co-spokesperson for MINERvA. “Already the world has a much greater understanding of these interactions.”

The idea for the experiment was first submitted to Fermilab in 2002 by two separate groups — one helmed by Fermilab scientist Jorge Morfin and one by McFarland. Bringing the two ideas together enriched the experiment as a whole and ultimately gave rise to MINERvA.

From conception to construction to data collection, the MINERvA collaboration actively recruited international participation in the experiment, encouraging contributions from numerous students and collaborators from around the world – including two institutes in India and five in Latin America (Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru) – to bring the experiment to life. MINERvA has welcomed 41 Latin American students and four Indian students, 30 of whom have completed advanced degrees.

“It’s been a wonderful experience,” said Morfin, former co-spokesperson for MINERvA. “It’s been a successful program for the students, and for all of MINERvA.”

MINERvA started collecting data in early 2010. In 2012, scientists working on MINERvA completed their first data set, allowing them to publish their initial findings. Following that, Fermilab increased its particle beam intensity, which increased the number of neutrinos available to MINERvA. As a result, the collaboration collected 10 times the amount of data compared to the previous run. Now MINERvA has officially completed its data acquisition.

But the work isn’t done.

“We still have a lot of data to analyze,” Fields said. “Completing our run was a celebration of MINERvA’s past and, more importantly, a look towards the future of MINERvA’s science and physics as a whole.”

Visit the MINERvA website. This work is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science.

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument seeks to further our cosmic understanding by creating the largest 3-D map of galaxies to date. Below is a press release issued by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory announcing first light for the optical lenses of this extraordinary instrument. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is a key player in the construction of this instrument, drawing on more than 25 years of experience with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Dark Energy Survey.

Fermilab contributed key elements to DESI, including the corrector barrel, hexapod and cage. The corrector barrel – designed, built and initially tested at Fermilab – aligns DESI’s six large lenses to within the accuracy of the width of a human hair. This precision is essential to ensure that the images DESI collects are sharp and clear. The hexapod, designed and built with partners in Italy, moves and focuses the lenses. Both the barrel and hexapod are housed in the cage, which was also designed and built by Fermilab. Additionally, Fermilab carried out the testing and packaging of the charge-coupled devices, or CCDs. The CCDs convert the light passing through these lenses from distant galaxies into digital information that can then be analyzed by the collaboration.

Fermilab also provided other components to the project, including the online databases used for data acquisition and the software that will ensure that each of the 5,000 robotic positioners are precisely pointing to their celestial targets.

“DESI promises to be at the core of the next decade of cosmological discoveries,” said Liz Buckley-Geer, a Fermilab scientist and a member of the DESI collaboration. “It’s an amazing project to be a part of, and we’re celebrating this moment with the entire DESI team.”

On April 1 the dome of the Mayall Telescope near Tucson, Arizona, opened to the night sky, and starlight poured through the assembly of six large lenses that were carefully packaged and aligned for a new instrument that will launch later this year.

Just hours later, scientists produced the first focused images with these precision lenses – the largest is 1.1 meters in diameter – during this early test spin, marking an important “first light” milestone for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI. This first batch of images homed in on the Whirlpool Galaxy to demonstrate the quality of the new lenses.

”It was an incredible moment to see those first images on the control room monitors,” said Connie Rockosi, who is leading this early commissioning of the DESI lenses. “A whole lot of people have worked really hard on this, and it’s really exciting to show how much has come together already.”

This phase of the project will continue for about six weeks and will require the efforts of several onsite scientists and remote observers, noted Rockosi, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz.

When completed later this year, DESI will see and measure the sky’s light in a far different way than this assembly of lenses. It is designed to take in thousands of points of light instead of a single, large picture.

The finished DESI will measure the light of tens of millions of galaxies reaching back 12 billion light-years across the universe. It is expected to provide the most precise measurement of the expansion of the universe and provide new insight into dark energy, which scientists explain is causing this expansion to accelerate.

DESI’s array of 5,000 independently swiveling robotic positioners, each carrying a thin fiber-optic cable, will automatically move into preset positions with accuracy to within several microns (millionths of a meter). Each positioner is programmed to point its fiber-optic cable at an object to gather its light.

That light will be channeled through the cables to a series of 10 devices known as spectrographs that will separate the light into thousands of colors. The light measurements, known as spectra, will provide detailed information about objects’ distance and the rate at which they are moving away from us, providing fresh insight about dark energy.

DESI’s lenses are housed in a barrel-shaped device known as a corrector that is attached above the telescope’s primary mirror, and the corrector is moved and focused by a surrounding device known as a hexapod.

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) researchers led the design, construction and initial testing of the corrector barrel, hexapod and supporting structures that hold the lenses in alignment.

“Our entire team is pleased to see this instrument achieve first light,” said Gaston Gutierrez, the Fermilab scientist who managed this part of the project. “It was a great challenge building such large devices to within the precision of a hair. We’re happy to see these systems come together.”

The giant corrector barrel and hexapod, which together weigh about 5 tons, must maintain alignment with the telescope’s large reflector mirror that is 12 meters below, all while compensating for the movement of the telescope’s assemblage of massive components as it swings across the sky.

“This is a big step up. It’s a leap into the future for the Mayall Telescope that will enable exciting new scientific discoveries,” said Michael Levi, DESI’s director and a physicist at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), which is the lead institution in the international DESI collaboration. “The team has been working on the new corrector for the past five years, so it was quite an experience seeing $10 million of optics lifted by the crane during installation.”

The new set of lenses expands the telescope’s viewing window by about 16 times, enabling DESI to map about one-third of the visible sky several times during its five-year mission.

Peter Doel, a professor at University College London, led the team that designed the new optical system. “We had a half-dozen vendors involved with making and polishing the glass. One mistake would have spoiled everything. It’s thrilling to know that they survived the journey and work so well.”

“This was kind of the moment of truth,” said David Schlegel, a DESI project scientist. “We have been biting our nails.”

David Sprayberry, the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) site director at Kitt Peak, said, “We have an amazing, multitalented team to make sure that everything is working properly,” including engineers, astronomers and telescope operators working in shifts. NOAO operates the Mayall Telescope and its Kitt Peak National Observatory site.

He noted the challenge in updating the sturdy, decades-old telescope, which started up in 1973, with high-precision equipment. “Ultimately we must make sure DESI can target to within 5-micron accuracy – not much larger than a human hair,” he said. That’s a big thing for something so heavy and big.” The entire moving weight of the Mayall Telescope is 375 tons.

Rockosi said there was intensive pre-planning for the corrector’s early testing, and many of the tasks during this testing stage are focused on gathering data from evening observations. While DESI scientists have created automated controls to help position, focus and align all of the equipment, this testing run allows the team to fine-tune these automated tools.

“We’ll look at bright stars and test how well we can keep the telescope targeted in the same place and measure image quality,” Rockosi said. “We will test that we can repeatedly and reliably keep those lenses in the best possible alignment.”

The precision testing of the corrector is made possible by an instrument – now mounted atop the telescope – that was designed and built by Ohio State University researchers. This 1-ton device, which features five digital cameras and measuring tools supplied by Yale University, and electronics supplied by the University of Michigan, is known as the commissioning instrument.

This temporary instrument was built at the same weight and installed at the same spot where DESI’s focal plane will be installed once it is fully assembled. The focal plane will carry DESI’s robotic positioners. The commissioning instrument simulates how the telescope will perform when carrying the full complement of DESI components and is verifying the quality of DESI’s lenses.

“One of the biggest challenges with the commissioning instrument was aligning all five cameras with the corrector’s curved focal surface,” said Paul Martini, an astronomy professor at Ohio State University who led the R&D and installation of the commissioning instrument and is now overseeing its use. “Another was measuring their positions to a few millionths of a meter, which is far more precise than most astronomical instruments.” This positioning will ensure truer measurements of the lenses’ performance.

He said he is looking forward to the installation of DESI’s focal plane later this year. That will pave the way for DESI’s official “first light” of its robotic positioners and the start of its galaxy measurements.

“What got me excited about this field in the first place was going to telescopes and taking data, so it will be fun to have this next step,” he said.

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DESI is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science; the U.S. National Science Foundation, Division of Astronomical Sciences under contract to the National Optical Astronomy Observatory; the Science and Technologies Facilities Council of the United Kingdom; the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; the Heising-Simons Foundation; the National Council of Science and Technology of Mexico; the Ministry of Economy of Spain; and DESI member institutions. The DESI scientists are honored to be permitted to conduct astronomical research on Iolkam Du’ag (Kitt Peak), a mountain with particular significance to the Tohono O’odham Nation. View the full list of DESI collaborating institutions, and learn more about DESI here: desi.lbl.gov.

Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest scientific challenges are best addressed by teams,Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratoryand its scientists have been recognized with 13 Nobel Prizes. Today, Berkeley Lab researchers develop sustainable energy and environmental solutions, create useful new materials, advance the frontiers of computing, and probe the mysteries of life, matter, and the universe. Scientists from around the world rely on the Lab’s facilities for their own discovery science. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory, managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.

The National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO)is the national center for ground-based nighttime astronomy in the United States and is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation Division of Astronomical Sciences.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1950 to promote the progress of science. NSF supports basic research and people to create knowledge that transforms the future.

The Heising-Simons Foundation is a family foundation based in Los Altos, California. The Foundation works with its many partners to advance sustainable solutions in climate and clean energy, enable groundbreaking research in science, enhance the education of our youngest learners, and support human rights for all people.

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, established in 2000, seeks to advance environmental conservation, patient care and scientific research. The Foundation’s Science Program aims to make a significant impact on the development of provocative, transformative scientific research, and increase knowledge in emerging fields.

The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) of the United Kingdom coordinates research on some of the most significant challenges facing society, such as future energy needs, monitoring and understanding climate change, and global security. It offers grants and support in particle physics, astronomy and nuclear physics; visit www.stfc.ac.uk.