Loki the Space Volcano - Sixty Symbols

so really cool new picture has come out to be honest it looks like a mistake so in fact the back part was taken by the Voyager space probe as it was wandering past the solar system as it went past IO one of the moons of Jupiter but the orange stuff is the new stuff and that was an image taken of Io of this little bit of Io this is a tiny volcano on Io fact this is the most active volcano in the solar system it's called Loki this was an image that was taken recently of that volcano from the ground and that's the amazing thing that things that a few years ago we could only even hope to see by actually going and seeing them you know sending a space probe and actually going up close to have a look we now have the quality of images we can now take with telescopes on the ground means that you can actually see them from the ground the scale here we're talking about it's like a few hundred kilometers across it's on a fairly small scale of things and there are two clearly these two bright patches and this kind of looks like a horseshoe joining them up it's full and again it hasn't been analyzed in detail yet but it's thought that one of them is actually the erupting volcano itself and the other is that this is just this massive lava lake that forms and you can actually when you have these larvae likes just that you get the same kind of phenomenon on earth they tend to crust over and then the crust sinks and suddenly you see the lava again and so on so what think's happening here is that you're actually it's one of the phases where you can see this massive lava lake surrounding the volcano this is in the sort of near to medium fred so it's a few microns wavelength so it's beyond the visible wavelengths into the infrared part of the spectrum which is why volcano sharp very well because they're hot and that so these kind of wavelengths the infrared is a very good place to look because you're really seeing that that bright hot emission well it's an amazing thing right this idea that actually there we can take sensible pictures of geological phenomena on a moon of Jupiter from the ground is an amazing that the sharpness of the image you need to be able to pick out this kind of detail on something so tiny so far away is absolutely outstanding there's a couple of limitations to how sharp an image you can take from the ground and in fact we've talked about these a few times before one is that the Earth's atmosphere messes things up and so actually that blurs the images so you can't take very sharp images because of the Earth's atmosphere the other is there's a fundamental limit that basically is that the the sharpness of your image is dictated by the size of your telescope and the bigger you make a telescope the sharper the images you can make and what this new image has done it's basically sort of solved both of those problems in the sense that it uses some very sophisticated and it needs to get out both get rid of the effects of the atmosphere and to deal with this limitation of how sharp an image you can take with a finite size of telescope okay so I have another picture for you this is the telescope that did the job it's a thing called the large binocular telescope or the LBT it's in Arizona it's on Mount Graham in Arizona joint venture by several countries that run this telescope each of these is an eight and a half meter diameter mirror to give you a sense of the scale of this thing so it's a very big telescope in fact it's two very big telescopes what's a bit unusual about it is that they're not independent telescopes actually both point in the same direction so they actually you can combine the light from the two and either you can just use that combined light to look at fainter things because you've got more collecting area so you've seen fine things but the neat trick here is actually you can combine the light from the two in a coherent fashion which in terms of this sharpness limit this diffraction limit for a telescope means that effectively you've got a single telescope that's kind of the distance between the two of them rather than the diameter of each each one individually so the effective diameter of the two when they're working together I think is about 22 or 23 meters of figuring out the angular resolution of this these images are very very sharp images you can see very fine detail very small angular scales it's about 32 million seconds and I was doing trying to figure out something that puts that into perspective in perspective you could see how many fingers I was holding up from my hand if I were standing a hundred kilometers away from you 60 miles away from you using an image of that sharpness so it's really is picking out incredibly fine detail because of this very high angular resolution you have with this 10 d if you stood I suspect I've probably done emit brightly enough in the infrared for it to actually be able to record my emission but certainly in terms of the resolution of the images yes it will be able to tell that but I would have to be glowing fairly brightly in the infrared for that to work so that's acting like one mirror but it's pretty clear to me there's some pretty coals in that mirror there's a huge gap in between and above and like like that's like a mirror with most of the mirror missing to me yeah and it's actually it's worse than that because it's if you if you think about it it's actually bigger in this direction that is in this direction which means in terms of the sharpness of the images you get the images are a much sharper in the horizontal direction they are in the vertical direction and you've got all these gaps and so on so there's a couple of again a couple of tricks you can play which is if you think about it as you trace an object if you think about a kind of an extended object so here I am with my telescope looking this way and it's following this extended object when an object what happens to it is as time goes on as the Earth rotates it'll rise and then it'll set again and if you look at the direction on my hand you can see that actually the star here my hand is pointing kind of more-or-less upwards then it becomes horizontal then it points downwards and so actually at different times I can use this extra resolution the telescope has in the horizontal direction to tell me about different aspects of this object because it's its orientation is changing as it tracks across the sky and so by combining images that you've taken at different times as an object tracks across the sky you can actually use that extra resolution in all directions to get a sharp an image which is sharp in all aspects rather than being squashed one way and you know very sharp in one direction and blurring in the other direction you can combine all those images together to create a single image of the object which is as sharp as if you had a single telescope effectively kind of this kind of size and round because it's actually hard to get this to work this is a you know it's a very sophisticated technique this is probably the best image I've ever seen taken with this kind of technique you do have this problem that you can't just take a snapshot you do have to combine these whole series of images together and then you've got to do all this fancy processing the object needs to be relatively bright so you can do these kind of techniques on it so there are limitations to it there are still real advantages of having a single big telescope but what this telescope is really giving us is kind of a foretaste of the sorts of things we're going to be able to do when that next generation of big telescopes comes along because already it's getting images of kind of the sharpness we would get with a single Very Large Telescope I've seen some pretty impressive images of by space probes that went to IO I mean surely that's that's where it's at I mean that you can't beat that game yeah you can and you can see the quality of the image we're getting you know where you're seeing things 100 kilometers across when you actually got your space fro going there you can see something which is one kilometer across or even maybe in a hundred meters across so clearly you get much more if you're actually there of course the downside is it takes you a long time to get there it cost you rather a lot to get there space probes are incredibly expensive we have ignition and liftoff of Atlantis and the Sunnyvale flight director has just confirmed the successful deploy of the inertial upper stage and Galileo and typically if it's a flyby mission you get one shot of having a look at things and then you've gone where as here with this kind of technique we can actually monitor this volcano night after night year after year to see actually how's that structure changing how is this most active volcano in the entire solar system erupting if I gave you of being whack of money or if Bill Gates gave you a big bag of money insolence fuel that your choice mark do you want to build a Space Telescope or a huge array of these things what would you spend the money on

Channel: Sixty Symbols

Views: 118,686

Rating: 4.9841895 out of 5

Keywords: sixtysymbols, Jupiter (Planet), io, volcano, telescope

Id: Tza4NIgrHJg

Length: 7min 57sec (477 seconds)

Published: Wed May 20 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/SwordsOfVaul]

the first couple times he said we had pictures "from the ground" i thought "wow we landed something on Io?!?!"....

no stupid brain....from the ground of EARTH

[u/thundergonian]

/u/JeffDujon should make a side trip to Arizona on his next trip to San Francisco!