These 38 telescopes will spot exploding stars, may detect Planet 9: Report

The 38-telescope array has been funded by grants worth $1.3 million from the National Science Foundation and a philanthropic initiative named Schmidt Futures. The data will be available for free in real time and the software will issue alerts when it detects an event.

At least 38 small telescopes will begin monitoring a ‘slice’ of visible sky which is roughly 1,700 times the size of the full moon from October. The array of telescopes is called Argus Array Pathfinder, named after a man-eyed giant of Greek mythology.

The Argus Pathfinder will be registering the changes in the stars each second, and will be making a nightlong celestial movie, Science.org reported. The developers of this telescope are hopeful that the project will pave wave for a much larger array with 900 telescopes that could watch the entire visible night sky by 2025.

According to the report, the Argus telescopes will be capturing short-lived astrophysical events which include exploding stars, black holes, neutron star mergers and maybe stars which have been briefly hidden by a ‘long-postulated’ planet in our solar system. The telescopes will watch the sky with more mirror area than all the other telescopes put together, the project's team leader Nicholas Law of the University of North Carolina, told the website.

A group of five galaxies that appear close to each other in the sky: two in the middle, one toward the top, one to the upper left, and one toward the bottom are seen in a mosaic or composite of near and mid-infrared data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.  (Reuters)

The Science.org website reported that Argus array is aiming to achieve the vision with hundreds of telescopes each 20 centimetres across. Law said that the final array will match the light-gathering power of a telescope with a single 5-metre mirror which usually costs hundreds of millions of dollars.

The array will gradually follow the stars as the Earth rotates. The designers are planning to replace the charge-coupled devices light sensors used in most of the telescopes with metal oxide semiconductor detectors which are capable of reading data in less than a second.

The 38-telescope array has been funded by grants worth $1.3 million from the National Science Foundation and a philanthropic initiative named Schmidt Futures. The data will be available for free in real time and the software will issue alerts when it detects an event. This alert will help the telescopes to point to the same spot in the sky and collect more data.