This Image of the Week post is a little different. In fact, it's not really an image at all, but rather a time lapse video of the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS) at work. The VERITAS observatory is a very high energy gamma-ray detector array located in southern Arizona. The video was made using 999 thirty-second exposures taken on 19 Feb 2010 by Adler Planetarium astronomers Jose Francisco Salgado, Mark SubbaRao, and Paul Knappenberger.
This video captures one of the four telescopes in the array as it scans the night sky searching for gamma-ray signals from galaxies, supernova remnants and other exotic sources. The search for gamma-ray emission will help scientists to better understand the Universe around us, and possibly help answer some of the big scientific questions of our time. What is dark matter? What did the first galaxies look like, and how did they form?
I wish I had some answers for these questions to share with you, but I don't. So for now, enjoy the image, er, video of the week.
Video Credit: Adler Planetarium, Jose Francisco Salgado, Mark SubbaRao, and Paul Knappenberger
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Maybe the best blog that I have read all year…
Augustus