Next-Generation Space Telescope Getting Modeled at SXSW
Photo Courtesy NASAFirst it was a music festival, then a film festival, then an interactive festival. Since then, South by Southwest has added education, the environment and venture capital to its repertoire. Could SXSW Space be far off?
You might see the first step on Friday. NASA is bringing its next-generation space telescope to the Long Center, or at least a full-size model of it. TheJames Webb Space Telescope is scheduled to launch in 2018; it’s the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. KUT’s Matt Largey spoke withSteve Finkelstein, an astronomer at UT, about the faraway things Webb can see that Hubble can’t, because of the Doppler effect.
When things move away from you, the waves get stretched, and that makes them look redder. And so essentially all galaxies are moving away from us because the universe is expanding. And the more farther away a galaxy is, the faster it’s moving away from us, and the more shifted its light gets; we actually call this shift a red shift, because everything is moving away so it gets redder. You kind of get to the point Hubble can only see so far before all of the visible light that you normally see in your eye gets completely red-shifted out of Hubble’s range.
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