From all of us at TMT, best wishes for a very joyous holiday season and a terrific 2008!
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TMT at the Austin AAS Meeting
TMT NFIRAOS Review
Focus
On—Chile,
Window to the Universe
Science
Nugget—Exploring the Epoch of Galaxy Formation in "3-D"
Q & A with Paul Gillett Paul Gillett is the TMT acting Facilities Manager. He previously worked on the Gemini South Observatory. He was interviewed in the TMT office by Warren Skidmore. Download
Interview Previous Issues View the TMT Newscast Archive. |
The Gordon and
Betty Moore Foundation
Exciting
things are happening at the TMT project as you can see from the
articles in this Newscast. To hear more about our latest
news, or to talk to TMT partnership scientists, visit us at the
American Astronomical Society meeting on 5 – 10 January
2008 in Austin, TX. You can ask questions, see our latest
designs, and pick up our new brochure. See you in Austin!
The TMT NFIRAOS team was pleased by the interest and
attendance at the first interim review of NFIRAOS held all day
on December 5, 2007, at the one-third point of the Preliminary
Design phase for NFIRAOS, the facility Adaptive Optics system for
the TMT. Members of the TMT AO group together with
the NFIRAOS design team from the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics
in Victoria, BC, Canada, presented and discussed the design and
its status. The Preliminary Design phase of NFIRAOS,
and this first interim review in particular, concentrates on performance
modeling, and refining NIFRAOS' specifications and interfaces,
especially those that affect instruments and the telescope structure.
This was an informal review without an invited review panel, and
we welcomed all members of the TMT community together with guests
from the national optical observatories of the US and Japan. Interest
was high, as was apparent by the seven video connections to the
conference room at the TMT project office in Pasadena. The
audience provided valuable suggestions, and we did not identify
any show-stoppers.
Astronomy
has two major clusters of observatories, one in Hawaii on Mauna
Kea and Haleakala, and another in Northern Chile. The remarkable
skies in these two locations are global resources for astronomy.
13 observatories lie on Mauna Kea alone. TMT is studying sites
in both Hawaii and in Chile and we have described our campaign
several times in these pages. The TMT Board plan is to make a
final selection in 2008. As part of building the basis for this
decision, we have been learning as much as we can about these
locations beyond our atmospheric measurements. 
One
of the most exciting possibilities enabled by the light-gathering
power of TMT is to achieve "tomographic" observations
of the distribution of gas both inside and outside of galaxies
in the young universe. At early times, most of the normal matter
in the universe- mostly in the form of gas- was actually outside
of galaxies, tracing what we believe is a "web-like" structure
formed by the distribution of dark matter. Galaxies formed where
the "cosmic web" is densest, where filamentary structures
intersect. Fresh hydrogen gas from the "intergalactic
medium" (IGM) was being rapidly accreted by forming galaxies,
providing fresh fuel for the rapid star formation taking place
in the densest regions near the centers of galaxies. At the same
time, the vast amounts of energy produced by massive star formation
and the subsequent supernova explosions, as well as by accretion
of material onto super-massive black holes developing at the centers
of the galaxies, has a profound (but highly uncertain) effect on
the evolution of individual galaxies. This "feedback" of
energy into the young galactic systems almost certainly drove large
quantities of heavy elements (formed in the most massive young
stars and their supernovae) into the IGM, limited the efficiency
with which stars could form, and somehow provided a natural thermostat
which determined the maximum mass a single galaxy could attain. How
these energetic processes worked to shape the universe of galaxies
is perhaps the largest unsolved problem in understanding the formation
of galaxies. We believe that the most rapid period of galaxy
growth occurred at redshifts of z~2-4, when the universe was only
10-20% of its current age (10-12 billion years ago). 