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17 Jun 2002
A miniature forest of robotically controlled optical fibers has sprouted from the end of the 120-inch Shane Telescope at Lick Observatory near San Jose, letting astronomers capture and analyze faint rays of light from dozens of distant stars or galaxies at the same time.
Named the multi-object spectrograph (MOS), the device is the fruit of a collaboration between researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, which operates Lick Observatory, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). After more than a decade of design, manufacture, tests, and refinements, MOS became available for routine use last fall.
MOS shuffles its slender quartz fibers into preprogrammed positions in five minutes, with a tolerance of just 10 microns. Similar fiber-optic spectrographs elsewhere take as long as half an hour to move from one set of targets on the sky to the next, sacrificing valuable observing time, according to principal designer Jean Brodie, associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz.
Brodie and her collaborators plan to use the instrument to study clusters of galaxies that emit x-rays, stars in "open clusters," regions in the Milky Way where stars form, supernova remnants, and globular clusters around our sister galaxy, M31, in Andromeda. The latter study promises to shed light on the structure, evolution, and chemical history of this grand spiral galaxy.
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