High in the mountains of northern Chile, the MOTHRA telescope may still be under construction, but it is already offering a new look at some of the universe’s most difficult-to-photograph processes. The telescope produced an image of the Helix Nebula, a striking example of the end of a star’s life cycle.
MOTHRA, which stands for Modular Optical Telephoto Hyperspectral Robotic Array, is a telescope designed to capture images of large yet faint objects in our night sky — particularly the cosmic web of diffuse gases and dark matter that spans the distance between galaxies. To accomplish this, the system will use 1,140 camera lenses that work in tandem, looking both wide and deep.
While testing 172 of the lenses installed in the system so far, scientists saw something surprising. After turning the telescope toward the oft-photographed Helix Nebula, they saw faint bands of stellar debris dissolving into space around it. The observation was described in a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
“We saw that image, and we were like: ‘This is new. This is something that we’ve never seen before,’” said Pieter van Dokkum, a physicist at Yale University and an author of the new study. “And when we did some research, it turned out that no one else had seen it before either.”
The Helix Nebula, sometimes called the “Eye of God” because of its eye-like shape, is an example of what a star can look like at the end of its life cycle. As a star runs out of hydrogen fuel in its core, it starts shedding its outer layers. This excess material swirls around the star and eventually is dissolved into the interstellar medium, which is the gas, dust and energy between the universe’s stars.
Although that nebula was first spotted back in 1893 and is well known for its large size and proximity to Earth, prior scientists hadn’t had the equipment available to see its dim outermost bands of debris shown in the new photo.
“We don’t often see how the material that a star lost is being mixed into the gases between the stars,” said Joel Kastner, an imaging scientist and astronomer at the Rochester Institute of Technology. “I think there’s all kinds of things beyond our galaxy that this kind of imaging is going to be useful for.”
The researchers say that the finished telescope, which will take pictures with about nearly six times as many lenses, will have the capability to photograph objects much fainter than nebulae.
“This thing is so stupidly powerful that even when you’re building it, all you have to do is point it at anything, and cool things are going to emerge,” said Roberto Abraham, an astronomer at the University of Toronto and an author of the study. “But we didn’t build this to take pretty pictures. We built it to try and understand how galaxies form and evolve.”
MOTHRA’s project scientists expect the telescope to be completed in early 2027.
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