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The truth is out there... |
Dr. Dave Routledge |
Humans have been observing the sky and looking to it for answers since antiquity, but we've been missing most of the information it contains. "There is a lot more to the universe than what we can see with our eyes," says electrical and computing engineering professor, Dr. Dave Routledge, "and some of it is potentially dangerous."
Routledge works with a National Research Council radio telescope at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory (DRAO) located near Penticton, B.C. He co-supervises graduate students who spend most of their time at the facility and also helps to interpret the data gathered there.
DRAO was put together on a shoestring budget. "They found some of [the dishes] in people's backyards. It's the ultimate cheap telescope. They bought them all cut to ribbons and welded them back together," says Routledge. The telescope started with two dishes and now has seven, nine-metre dishes working together to observe the stars.
It's a symbiotic relationship between the University of Alberta and DRAO.
"Our graduate students work with the staff, engineers, technicians and scientists there to create new designs which are built into the telescope. The telescope is then offered to everybody around the world as a Canadian national facility," says Routledge. "Our graduate students re-engineer and improve the power and versatility of the DRAO radio telescope, and in return we are able to attract the brightest and best graduate students out there to work at a world-class research facility."
Although Routledge is a professor of electrical engineering, his passion has always been astronomy. He is currently observing atomic hydrogen interacting with the remnants of a supernova (that's a star that has exploded). With a smile, he says, "if you asked me to do that experiment in the laboratory, I couldn't do it.
A: I can't get funding for a 30,000 year explosion and B: I can't get things to occur on this scale in the lab."
"There are phenomena we are seeing that have never been seen before by people," says Routledge. For example, a
University of Calgary graduate student, Magdalen Normandeau, was mapping out a small section of the sky, only a few
degrees in width, and two major discoveries came out of her observations. First, she observed a cosmic chimney, which occurs when young stars within the galactic disc punch material perpendicularly out of the galactic disc. Second, a giant lens type structure made up of magneto-active ionized gases was discovered. "It was visible only because of its Faraday rotation properties and the new modifications of the telescope," says Routledge.
By observing these phenomena Routledge and his colleagues hope not only to learn how stars and interstellar material interact, but to use this new understanding here on earth. "We are going to see phenomena that could conceivably be brought back home. New phenomena that we can then engineer into new devices," says Routledge.
DRAO has been under threat of shutdown for years, but in 1997 it was announced that plans to close the facility by 2001 had been dropped. The information collected at DRAO is the major part of the Canadian Galactic Plane Survey (CGPS) and will provide research material for years to come. "Ten years from now there could be a graduate student from Argentina who discovers a phenomenon that had been overlooked by all the other investigators," says Routledge. It is not known what the CGPS data may contain. but the truth is out there-all we need to do is observe.
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