Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren vogelbam here. Our humble vantage point on Earth makes
Speaker 1: the night sky seem like a somewhat static scene, but
Speaker 1: in reality, the space around us is ablaze with spectacular
Speaker 1: phenomena that fairly swarmed the heavens, such as supernova a
Speaker 1: k a. Exploding stars and comments. Tracking these events is
Speaker 1: now a little bit easier thanks to the Zwicky Transient
Speaker 1: Facility a k a. The z t F at the
Speaker 1: Palomar Observatory in San Diego. Scientists from the California Institute
Speaker 1: of Technology and the University of Washington and eight other
Speaker 1: institutions announced the camera's launching in mid November. And if
Speaker 1: you're wondering where the snazzy name comes from, the project
Speaker 1: gets its name from Fritz Zwicky, the first astroiod physicist
Speaker 1: to conduct research at cal Tech. During his decades long career,
Speaker 1: Zwicky spotted about a hundred and twenty supernova in stark contrast,
Speaker 1: the instrument that bears his name should capture a fresh
Speaker 1: supernova less than twenty four hours old every single night.
Speaker 1: ZTF is a robotic camera that's attached to the Samuel
Speaker 1: Oskin telescope, which measures forty eight inches or one point
Speaker 1: two meters and has been scanning the sky since the
Speaker 1: World War two ERAZTF will operate from early to the
Speaker 1: end of likely witnessing tens of thousands of transient events
Speaker 1: like the blooming of distant supernova asteroids and even planets
Speaker 1: caught in the inexorable pull of giant black holes. The
Speaker 1: five hundred and seventy six megapixel camera captures a full
Speaker 1: forty seven degrees of the northern sky and just a
Speaker 1: single image that's about seven times as much of the
Speaker 1: sky's earlier cameras. For reference, the sky all around Earth
Speaker 1: is about forty thousand square degrees, and the ZTF captures
Speaker 1: three thousand, seven hundred and fifty square degrees of the
Speaker 1: heavens every hour. That means that after three nights of work,
Speaker 1: the ZTF will have accumulated images of the entire night sky.
Speaker 1: The system processes those images two and a half times
Speaker 1: faster than older cameras, meaning researchers can take more pictures,
Speaker 1: spotting ephemeral events that slower devices would miss. But that's
Speaker 1: only they have the hard drive space. Each image has
Speaker 1: a resolution of about twenty four thousand square pixels. The
Speaker 1: pictures are so big that they can't really be viewed
Speaker 1: on a single display. One researcher estimates that you need
Speaker 1: about seventy two average computer monitors to see one of
Speaker 1: ztfs full resolution images. Ztfs primary role is to simply
Speaker 1: capture and identify transient events in the sky. Later, other
Speaker 1: facilities will help sort through the massive amounts of data,
Speaker 1: which will also be openly published for the entire astronomy
Speaker 1: community to view, and there will be even bigger telescopes
Speaker 1: to come, like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. Today's episode
Speaker 1: was written by Dathan Chandler and produced by Tristan McNeil.
Speaker 1: For more in this and lots of other spaced out topics,
Speaker 1: visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com.