Word: cfa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...astronomy's ignorance is rapidly being dispelled, thanks in large part to two researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). Since 1985, Margaret Geller and John Huchra have been meticulously crafting a three-dimensional map that charts the positions of thousands of galaxies. Last week, in the journal Science, they presented their latest map of one small chunk of the visible universe, and the findings are startling...
...CfA study is not the first to see dark voids and large conglomerations of galaxies, but it is by far the most comprehensive. The reason no one had done such a search earlier, says Huchra, is that galaxy mapping is extremely time consuming. Their survey of 4,000 galaxies took about 1,000 hours of telescope time...
...meantime, the CfA study will go on, and other mapping efforts are in the works. "Big as it is," Geller explains, "our survey area compared with the visible universe is like Rhode Island compared with the surface of the earth." The bubbles and walls could be isolated phenomena. But, notes Geller: "Every survey ever done has contained structures as big as the survey could contain." If that trend continues, then there are larger objects yet to be found, which will give theorists even worse headaches. "These surveys test in the most acute way our conceptions of how structure developed...
...great thing that will make enormous progress for astronomy," says Professor Emeritus Fred L. Whipple, former director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CFA). The ST would gain the additional range because its view would be free of obscuring, human-produced light and atmospheric pollution, Whipple said...
Closer to home, the CFA has proposed building a $20 million, four-meter telescope in the Southern Hemisphere. "Harvard has been dragging its feet," however, content to rely on the Smithsonian-owned observing facilities, says Geller. The new telescope would cost two-thirds of the center's annual operating budget...