CHAPTER 22
The South Pole Telescope, or SPT, is a marvel of science and engineering. It stands as a sentinel over the white planes of ice, its distinctive dish pointed skyward, sweeping the heavens for faint signals of energy that have traveled billions of years from the very edges of the universe.
There is a popular internet conspiracy theory floating around out there that speculates the purpose of the SPT is for communicating with an alien race on the distant planet of Nibiru. This would be pretty cool if it were true, but simple aliens and mere planets, fictitious or otherwise, are way below the scope of the SPT. No, the South Pole Telescope has a decidedly more laudable purpose. What we are talking about here is much grander in scale entirely, namely exploring the formation of entire galaxies, and discovering the origins of the universe itself.
The SPT’s large dish and extremely sensitive sensors are scanning the sky in a similar fashion to the MAPO experiment, by monitoring the ever so faint cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation that pervades all of space. But whereas MAPO uses a very wide angled view of the sky to collect data about the CMB and its dispersion across the universe, SPT has a much finer focus and resolution by comparison, only looking at small areas of the sky at a time. The telescope sweeps back and forth stitching these highly detailed areas together to make a mosaic of the entire sky. The idea is that the CMB, which was created during the big bang, and allowed to escape after the early universe cooled to a temperature below that of a plasma, say after 400,000 years or so, can be used as a literal 14 billion year old cosmic backlight. Any local dimming of the CMB in a particular area of the sky indicates that there was something between our telescope and the CMB, much like a backlit actor on stage casts a silhouette. On these scales though, the actor is an entire galaxy, in its infancy, before it coalesced into a bright star filled swirling mass we see today. By observing the subtle fluctuations of the CMB over these silhouetted areas, it is possible to determine the process that took place in the galaxy’s formation and in that, get ready for it… discover the nature of Dark Matter and Dark Energy! which are thought to be the great driving forces behind the workings of the Universe.
Kacey and I had the unique privilege of touring the SPT one exceptionally brilliant day at the South Pole. After a long, very cold walk that took us across the skiway and out to the ‘Dark Sector’- a designated area located far enough from the station to minimize artificial light pollution- we climbed a steep flight of solitary stairs up into the main laboratory building of the South Pole Telescope. Francisco, one of the lead scientists for the telescope, greeted us and gave a pretty good layman’s explanation of the telescope. It is still incredible to me that this PhD, soon to be Nobel laureate, scientific genius happily took time out of his busy day to show two wide eyed dishwashers around his lab- I’ll say it again, regardless of how society paints geeky brainiac scientists, I’d rank them as true blue in my book. He showed us the guts of the telescope, and then took us on the roof for a good view of the SPT’s giant dish, all the time patiently answering my barrage of questions. The only thing missing from the tour was that he stubbornly refused to let us send a message to Nibiru to ask those lazy aliens to come down and help with some of these dishes!
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