Sky is no limit as Google goes galactic
Online technology took another giant step forward yesterday, as Google revealed its latest “toy”.
The search engine group has added an extra feature to its Google Earth tool — as well as zooming in on virtually any spot on Earth users can turn their gaze skywards.
The new facility is expected to allow thousands of schoolchildren in classrooms across the country to download images of constellations and stars that previously only NASA and users of the Hubble Telescope saw.
“This will be brilliant for science students and amateur astronomers. It’s so simple and a fun way to look at all things space-related. A lot of this hasn’t been available to the public until now,” said Darren Connolly with Google Ireland.
The new Sky tool allows users of Google Earth to view the sky as seen from planet Earth. Viewers will also have access to an incredible 100 million stars and 200 million galaxies.
The new online facility will allow people to transform Google Earth into a virtual telescope.
Other bonuses will include:
* Constellations: From Andromeda to Ursa Major. Users can learn about the stars that make up their favourite constellations.
* Backyard astronomy: This lets users look at place-marks and information on stars, galaxies, and nebulae visible to the eye, binoculars and small telescopes. Especially useful for the amateur astronomer.
* Hubble Space Telescope Imagery: More than 120 beautiful high-resolution images taken with the famous technology.
* Moon: Animations of lunar positions and moon phases.
* Planets: The planets and their positions in the sky two months into the future.
* User guide to galaxies: Users go on virtual tours through different types of galaxies, from Ursa Minor Dwarf to the Milky Way.
* Life of a Star: The stages of a star’s life cycle.
Sky can be accessed with a drop-down menu in Google Earth. There have been more than 200 million downloads of Google Earth since its launch in 2005.
Astronomy Ireland’s David Moore welcomed the new facility. He said it would ultimately increase the numbers of amateur astronomers already in Ireland.
* http://earth.google.com
THE telescope’s most enduring results were two pictures called the Hubble Deep Field and the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The first was made by photographing the same patch of sky in Ursa Major for 10 days, the second stared at a small patch of the Fornax cluster for 11 days.
The images revealed galaxies billions of light years away. The ultra deep field is the most sensitive astronomical image ever made using visible light.
One of Hubble’s main missions was to measure the distance to stars called Cepheid variables more accurately than ever before. This helped to better approximate the Hubble constant, which measures how quickly the universe is expanding.
Edwin Hubble helped scientists discover that the universe might be expanding at an ever-increasing rate, rather than decelerating under the influence of gravity, as they expected. So far, it is not understood why this is happening.
It was always suspected that black holes were found at the centres of many galaxies, but measurements from Hubble proved it, along with the fact that the size of the black hole determines many of the properties of a galaxy.
Other discoveries include planets far outside our solar system. Hubble also found discs of debris that might one day turn into planets around stars in the Orion Nebula.
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