Fifteen billion years after the Big Bang, at the deep-frozen southern polar axis of a tiny planet orbiting a small star in a medium-size galaxy, four telescopes are looking out, straining to see backwards into the creation of the universe.
The telescopes are at the center of Antarctica, several hundred feet from the South Pole, easily the most inhospitable place on Earth. From that unlikely vantage point they are taking human awareness through time and space to places it never has been.
The United States’ Amundsen-Scott scientific base at the South Pole, a $40-million-a-year federally funded enterprise, has become one of the world’s great astronomy centers. Its telescopes, though not the largest to be found, are highly experimental, testing the limits of technologies that, in some cases, weren’t around even five years ago.
Now that the austral winter has begun, it is dark at the South Pole 24 hours a day; temperatures hover at 100 degrees below zero Fahrenheit or lower. It will be this cold and dark until October.
Although such conditions might be inhospitable for people, they are about as perfect as you can find on Earth for telescopes.
Every day from now until October, five wintering astronomers begin their work with a trudge up the ramp of ice that leads from the surreal, geodesically domed American polar science station.
The scientists, armored against the cold, crunch roly-poly across snow and ice nearly a mile to a place called “the dark sector.”
The dark sector is three small structures built on stilts so snow will not build up around them as it does at the dome. They were built away from the science station to avoid the dome’s ambient heat and light, which could upset and distort delicate sensors, critical parts of telescopes atop the dark sector buildings.
In the continuum of the great human adventure, the astronomers who climb up to their dark sector labs are like the sailors who climbed into the crow’s nests of the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria 504 years ago. They are there to scan horizons never looked upon, searching for new things and unknown places.
And, like Christopher Columbus and his crew, the South Pole astronomers are worrying about the financial backing for their undertaking.
In this modern drama, Congress takes the role Queen Isabella played as Columbus’ sponsor. The National Science and Technology Council is about to issue a review of the entire $195-million-a-year U.S. science program in Antarctica, with particular emphasis on whether America needs a South Pole science station at all.
Nobody in Congress really disputes the brilliance of the work being done at the South Pole by the astronomers, tackling some of the most difficult theoretical research in science today. But, as the congressional refusal to fund the Texas superconducting supercollider showed, there is concern about justifying the expense of exotic research in an era of severe budget constraints.
The scientists argue the work they are conducting at the South Pole holds the same sort of promise of national riches that Columbus’ voyage produced for Spain. To stop funding such basic research, they warn, will endanger U.S. technological and economic primacy.
The National Science Foundation, the primary federal funding agency at the pole, grants about $5 million annually for polar astronomy. The foundation’s interest is double-barreled: To create new knowledge about the universe and to encourage development of valuable new technology the scientists invent for their telescopes.
Ever since Galileo studied the mountains on the moon with his first 30-power telescope in the 17th Century, astronomers have quested for instruments that can look deeper and with more acuity into space.
The goal now is to gain knowledge about the first moments of the Big Bang, when time, existence and the universe began 15 billion years ago.
In the tiniest fraction of the first second afterwards, all matter, energy and light in the universe was contained in a single dot smaller than a subatomic particle. Every particle within that microscopic universe was hurtling away from every other particle at nearly the speed of light.
The universe was expanding so fast that at 1/100,000th of the first second, it already was the size of our solar system, 3.7 billion miles across.
In those earliest micro-moments not even atoms existed, only wildly colliding subatomic particles–electrons, positrons, neutrinos and photons–in an expanding cosmic soup 4 million billion times denser than water.
With each particle trying to move away from every other particle at such blinding speed, the outer edges of the universe expanded away from its opposite edges faster than the speed of light.
The Big Bang itself is beyond our visible reach. But by measuring invisible wavelengths such as infrared, microwave and submillimeter radiation, the four South Pole telescopes are looking back at the evolving universe as far as 300,000 years after the Big Bang, barely a moment in the span of existence.
Three of the four are administered by the University of Chicago-based Center for Astrophysical Research in Antarctica. The fourth is an international effort administered at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
“Our game is building something that hasn’t been built before,” says Mark Hereld, a University of Chicago physicist and chief designer of one of the polar telescopes, SPIREX (South Pole Infrared Explorer).
“We’re interested in the evolution of stars and galaxies. We look around and try to take advantage of technologies as they are developed that might be useful to study these things.”
The resulting machines are so complicated and experimental that the winter-over astronomers at the pole are mere junior partners to the enterprise. They are coached daily on telescope operations via satellite linkup on the Internet, getting their instructions from telescope designers, builders and other technical savants and theoreticians in such places as Chicago, Boston and Uppsala, Sweden.
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The Internet connection is crucial because no one person can sufficiently understand the complexities of the telescopes.
“You could assign five people,” says Hereld, “all with different technical specialties, to one telescope down there, and they wouldn’t know enough collectively to cover everything that could go wrong.”
Mark Dragovan, a University of Chicago astrophysicist, built a telescope for his polar project, COBRA (Cosmic Background Radiation Anisotropy) that can see back 15 billion years. All that existed then was a thick mush of hydrogen, helium and lithium atoms, almost perfectly smooth in its consistency. The first molecules had not yet formed.
“This is the farthest distance that can be seen by any telescope,” Dragovan said.
The COBRA telescope’s sensitive detectors are able to measure tiny temperature variations in different regions of the mush, called anisotropies. They reveal differences of density from one region to another as small as 1/100,000th of a degree.
The tiny differences in density in the primordial mush of atoms meant an area with slightly more matter had slightly more gravity, the earliest evidence of matter beginning to clump together.
Where there was gravity, an escalating process began, with heavier regions compressing and shrinking into increasingly more dense matter.
Gravity formed sheets of galaxies and yawning space voids between them. The stars within them began cooking atoms, transmuting them into all the basic elements, including carbon, the foundation of life.
University of Chicago cosmologist Michael Turner calls the anisotropies, which he believes were already present in the first moments of the Big Bang, “the embryonic universe.”
“It’s those variations,” he says, “that encoded all the structure (billions of galaxy clusters, galaxies and trillions of stars) that we see today, like DNA is the blueprint of a human embryo.
“The subatomic world is very different from the world we live in, always fluctuating and unpredictable. How could subatomic things give rise to the largest things in the universe?
“Where did that lumpiness (in the primordial mush) come from?”
It seems certain that the structure of galaxies and stars was determined by the behavior of the subatomic particles in the first moments after the Big Bang.
At least 10 telescopes around the world are looking back at that lumpiness, searching for answers to Turner’s questions. Thus far, Dragovan’s South Pole telescope, even though it is still in a highly experimental stage, has been getting the most detailed, though still crude, look.
That is because the South Pole “seeing,” as astronomers say when rating the quality of the atmosphere earthbound telescopes must look through, is about is good as anywhere to be found in the world.
“The South Pole is good for astronomers because it is high, dry and cold,” says Robert Pernic, director of polar operations for the U. of C.’s Center for Astrophysical Research in Antarctica.
“It is a desert on top of an ice plateau 10,000 feet thick, and it’s so cold, all the water vapor is frozen out of the air.”
Even on the least-humid days in North America, if you could wring out the atmosphere over a typical city like Chicago, water vapor would produce a half-inch or more of rain.
By comparison, the atmosphere above the South Pole, the driest place on Earth, would yield about 1/4,000th of an inch of rain. That gives South Pole telescopes a very dry-eyed look at the heavens.
The pure, clear, 2-mile-thick ice cap itself is part of the “instrument” the Wisconsin-led AMANDA project is installing in the dark sector. The AMANDA (Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array) crew is boring 10 holes into the ice nearly to bedrock, dropping strings of 20 sensors into them.
When it is completed, about a square kilometer of ice will become, in effect, a giant detector.
It captures the trail of celestial subatomic particles as they travel through Earth, using them to locate bizarre objects and events such as black holes, pulsars and dying stars.
The best place for telescopes is on satellites in space, as the amazing pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope have proven, with no distorting atmosphere to contend with.
But Hubble has also proven how risky and expensive a space telescope can be.
As pure science, the work polar astronomers are doing with their telescopes helps to satisfy humanity’s seemingly innate need to understand its own existence.
At such a high cost, however, science must come up with more than new knowledge to justify the expense.
Columbus’ ultimate payoff to Queen Isabella for financing his adventure was an accidental one, a river of gold that flowed from a world no European knew existed until Columbus dared the journey.
The polar scientists argue pure science such as they practice usually also has spectacular payoffs, though more practical, moral and ultimately valuable than Spain’s looted New World gold. In their case, they believe it will come from the technological advances they develop in conceiving and building their telescopes.
“As a science manager, I like cosmology because it’s so damn hard,” says John Lynch, the National Science Foundation’s South Pole science chief who oversees the astronomy installations.
There is great value, he says, in turning loose a brilliant mind like that of Harvard University astrophysicist Antony Stark’s on problems that would seem insurmountable to most people.
“They may come up with an idea that solves their own problem, and they are satisfied. But somebody else may see in that idea applications the scientist never dreamed of, and change the world with it. That’s how laser technology began, by astronomers tinkering around, looking for better tools to do their work with.”
Stark, says Lynch, has put together technological components for his AST/RO (Antarctic Submillimeter Telescope and Remote Observatory) telescope that seem almost certain to someday have spinoff applications far removed from astrophysics.
Among the components Stark needed when he and his colleagues designed AST/RO were machined parts smaller than a bacterium. Stark can tap into specialists all over the world, engineers, toolmakers and physicists, and he knew just the photolithographer who could machine the tiny part.
“The technology is absolutely new,” says Lynch. “It ultimately depends on the photolithographic advances that have resulted in microprocessor chips.
“When Tony is thrashing around, figuring out a machine to solve his problems, he goes to people around the world he thinks can make the components he needs. This gets a lot of people involved in some really hard problems, and the machines that result sometimes have value far beyond what they were intended for.
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“I can’t sit here and say what spinoffs might come from (AST/RO). But it sure looks like it might be useful in the development of robotics, perhaps, or be used in some fashion in microsurgery or prosthesis.”
The astronomers are in the vanguard pushing to replace the central, domed complex of the station, built in 1975.
Outmoded, wearing out and slowly being enveloped by the continual buildup of the ice cap by polar snow, the dome is scheduled to be replaced around the beginning of the century.
The design of the proposed new station is along the lines of the buildings put up by the astronomers, on stilts. The $200-million project, if it gets the go-ahead from Congress, would take about eight years to complete, but would comfortably and more efficiently accommodate at least 50 winter-over scientists, staff and their projects.
The new station proposal, however, prompted the Senate Appropriations Committee to ask the White House to appoint a panel to review U.S. Antarctic science and expenditures in general.
“Our concern is money,” says one committee staffer, saying such a large capital outlay demands reviewing the polar program.
“Funding in aggregate for basic research is on a declining slope. I don’t know of any criticism of the quality of (Antarctic) science. The review is prompted simply by the restraints in our budget.”