Toni Santana-Ros is an asteroid hunter.
At night, after the last of the day’s phoenix rays have faded to black, the sky looks like watching space rocks floating through the gravitational waves of our solar system. Sometimes he sees shards casually wandering by the Earth, the safety of telescopes with a gentle “hey” never to be observed again. But now and then it seizes its course with a bang in our tender blue world.
Last year, Santana-Ros, a planetary scientist at the University of Alicante in Spain, sprang into action when astronomers realized an asteroid, named 2022 WJ1, was headed for the border between Canada and the US. With barely four hours on the clock, he counted his team to help point out how threatening this asteroid was. What towns are threatened? Would it be like killing a Chicxulub dinosaur, or just make a “plop” sound before dropping into a mighty body of water?
“Fortunately,” he said, “it was a small object and soon produced a ball of spectacle.”
But what if such a sensitive asteroid warning was sent in November 2020, when the Santana-Rose telescopes were closed due to bushes destroying the region and covering the lenses with layers of ash? Or in February of 2021, when a bushfire blew debris into some telescopes, forcing astronomers to jump down their instruments and pull blobs of soot from them after the wind settled?
“Climate change is already relevant to astronomy and my work,” Santana-Ros said.
Studies have shown time and time again that climate change is leading to increases in the occurrence and severity of wildfires in recent years. With the current greenhouse gas emission trajectory, some models even predict that the risk of major wildfires in the US will increase sixfold by mid-century.
During his telescope shutdowns, Santana-Ross said he received an interrupted message while he was comfortably at home. “It wasn’t a big drama.”
But those flames prevented the team from using telescopes for several weeks.
“The bottom line here is that we were lucky this time and just missed some observations,” he said. “Next, we were facing real danger.”
An astronomical question
In the past few decades, climate change has changed our relationship with the Earth.
Global industries are still burning coal for cheap power, spreading dangerous fossil fuels into the atmosphere, forcing our planet to heat up, and ultimately as fuel for devastation. wildfires responsible for the Santana-Ros investigation. Meanwhile, scientists are trying to learn how to protect endangered animals without homes, because deforestation has destroyed the animals’ habitats, and how to deal with cyclones tearing apart coastal villages.
It is almost as if we are no longer part of our planet, no longer blending into its environment like the oaks and butterflies with which we share the cosmic matter. It is as if we are fighting to regain our place as terrestrials.
But amid such chaos, astronomers are beginning to think of another angle to cheer up the crisis. Not only is our relationship with the Earth fraught, but climate change could also taint our relationship with the rest of the world.
As global warming sweeps away, telescope-based telescopes will make it harder to wake us up from asteroids, show us glowing galaxies, and give us glimpses of mysterious exoplanets populating the rest of eternity—miracles that connect us beneath the layers of discord, as evidenced by a. The ubiquitous love we witnessed from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope two Christmas years ago.
Cyclones, floodsFires and droughts They become standard in astronomy songs like Hawaii and New Mexico. Sites such as the Les Makes Observatory were hit by severe storms at the same time as Santana-Rose with wildfire equipment near Australia.
And not only to be full of calamities to worry about. There are also smaller things: changes in temperature, in humidity, in stable weather – the elements of the telescope are usually based on working in top shape.
A recent paper, published last October in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, delves into the details while outlining the ominous future of astronomy. Its authors are exploring the specifics of what climate change can do to eight major optical telescopes scattered around the world. Not just today, but 2000.
“Our results show that climate change will negatively impact the quality of astronomical observations,” they say, “and will likely increase the time lost due to poor site conditions.”
Lost time, nights, swayed by fate.
“My first reaction to the paper was ‘yikes’ – yet another depressing outcome of climate change,” said Clara Sousa-Silva, an astrophysicist at Bard College. “I hadn’t considered before how it would affect future observations, but of course it makes perfect sense. Of course, in the long list of tragedies that will come from a warming Earth, this is very far down the list of concerns, but it’s about.”
“Anecdotally,” he continued, though carefully noting the likelihood of confirmation, “complaining observers have seen more and more nights lost to the weather in recent years.”
A barrier to the stars
Together with his advisers, Caroline Haslebacher, a doctoral student at the University of Bern in Switzerland and the author of a recent study, realized that no one had really looked at how astronomical observations could affect climate change, despite the Santana-Ros experience. the damage has already been done.
They quickly fill the gap.
The team modeled what would happen to those eight telescope subjects as the globe warms, eventually suggesting we will see an increase in what are known as specific humidity and precipitable water vapor in the coming years.
Essentially, this means that the amount of water in the atmosphere will get higher due to climate change – a problematic situation, because atmospheric water tends to absorb the same light that telescopes are trying to capture the most.
“Astronomical observations made at the very edge of instrumental capabilities are very exciting,” said Sousa-Silva. “Any additional noise directly restricts the discoveries we can make.”
For example, the study of the authors is expected in the extinct mountain Mauna Kea in Hawaii, where many observatories lie, there will be an increase of 0.3 mm of water by 2050. Granted, such a small impact seemed quite soft compared. with other places. “But it’s still not zero,” John O’Meara, chief scientist of Mauna Kea’s Keck Observatory, said.
With this paper in mind, he was mainly concerned about the growth of water vapor affecting not visible light but rather light
infrared observations in place of Hawaii. Such cloaks are very likely to pose problems for this category of light that emanates from the distant universe.
As the wavelengths stretch further and further away from our planet, they become redder and redder over time, until they turn into illusory patterns in the infrared – invisible to the human eye, but analyzable by advanced machines. This very form of light signifies a loving scientist, such as was able to reveal to us what first afflicted the world.
It would be a shame that such rich levels of cosmic history would slowly fade from our perspective on Earth.
“The effects of climate change have not historically been included in site selection studies, and are now a new variable to consider,” said O’Meara.
Because of this, Haslebacher believes that in order to progress, we must build the analysis trends with telescopes.
“There is a telescope under construction,” he said, “since this can.”they are still adapting their plans to changing weather conditions, and taking telescopes into plans so that a place with the least impact can be selected.”
But even that effort is not enough to overcome the barriers this crisis will create. More water vapor simply reduces light transmission in certain spectral bands. Or, as Sousa-Silva puts it, literally look less.
Only space for machines
Since the Industrial Revolution, almost like humanity has existed in a disjointed loop of thinking about climate change – which has unexpectedly turned into a political debate.
Last year, COP27 marked the 27th year that world leaders will debate how to save the Earth – and another year the world’s scientists have confirmed we’re missing quite a bit.
“In light of this, we need to highlight that the socio-economic scenario path shared with the highest greenhouse gas emissions can be made in five ways,” Haslebacher said in his paper. “Poor, we are following this mission today.”
In other words, in the worst case, the mission is the mission we are living now.
However, some manufacturers and industry giants are promoting this human rebellion against the natural world — and even encouraging it — because fossil fuels give us cheap power. And without affordable energy worries, we need to dip into other financial measures as penance to keep our iPhone batteries in a healthy green color.
But to support fossil fuel power, we pay back in other ways.
“We know what we as a nation and the world need to do to avoid the worst possible outcomes, and yet we refuse to act on the big scale that the situation demands,” O’Meara said. “I am afraid that it will take the first disaster or really major conflict to wake us up, and then, hopefully, it will be too late to avoid the next one.”
Further, the same pollution which is caused by the heating of the globes, is bound to do so by the thickness of the air.
“The air is optically denser in which less radiation travels,” said Alois Vidale, professor of Climate and Climate System Science at the University of Reading and co-author of the study. “Although” [our] models that considered the total future emission levels still underestimated the impact of air pollution on local visibility.
O’Meara simply explained: “More clouds are less visible because they are fainter and less science.”
To name a few consequences: global warming could degrade the atmospheric qualities of the entire telescope site, creating downright turbulent conditions for observations. It could prevent scientists from cooling their machines until the right checks are made before embarking on a project – and, to be honest, the concerns are high enough to impact not just astronomy, but all science.
“It’s going to change all over the world,” Santana-Ros said. “It is likely that climate change will be the source of future financial crises, which in turn will have a negative effect on research funding.”
The funding of science projects is already a huge conundrum – more often than not, only those who win grants, awards, scholarships and other such rewards can pursue the work for years to come.
Add to that, if we expect to deal with climate change, and then something drastic happens, it is necessary to redirect resources from astronomy, medicine, chemistry, biology, botany and others, into climate science.
“It’s still time for science and technology to get us to better places in the future,” O’Meara said. “All we need is purpose and investment.” It is becoming clearer that without immediate action, the promise of ground-based telescopes may someday become a thing of the past – dying alongside the other beautiful things that humans have protected from the disaster it has created.
At that point, the only links we have left to the stars are our space-borne machines: the Webb Space Telescope, the Hubble – metal worms floating above the devastated Earth, witnesses to the human exit from the natural world.
“Colonial plans for other planets are still sci-fi and will be for several decades,” Santana-Ros said. “Our only option for survival is to mitigate climate change.”
All photos: Robert Rodriguez/CNET.
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