![]() ![]() But a terahertz observatory, utilizing a five-meter telescope, would be different from other equipment on Dome A because it would allow scientists to look at the details of how important parts of the universe formed. Other observatories and weather stations on Dome A are operated by the Australian and Chinese governments. It is visited only a few times each year by maintenance crews that travel 750 miles from the coast in specially outfitted tractors. The icy, white mountain top called Dome A, or Dome Argus, is the highest point in Antarctica and possibly the best place on Earth to look back in time at how the universe formed.Īt the top of Dome A, is a smattering of antenna masts, small shipping containers, scientific equipment and a lot of footprints that take years for the snow and meager wind to cover up. The location is so arid that if all the water vapor in a narrow column stretching straight up from the ground to the edge of space were condensed, according to the researchers, it would form a film less than about 1/250th of an inch, or twice the width of a human hair, and about 10 times less than the water vapor at Hawaii's Mauna Kea Observatories, one of the world's best astronomical observing sites. “Dome A is very high,” he says. “It's probably the driest place on the ground that we know of.” So we need to find a place with minimal water vapor in the air.” “The water vapor is a major inconvenience for those wavelengths,” Zhang says. Water vapor in the atmosphere typically hides and distorts reception of light and radio waves reaching the Earth from distant parts of the universe, including the terahertz frequency range. ![]() Although it is plentiful in the universe, the opacity of our atmosphere makes it difficult to study from Earth. Terahertz radiation is a band on the electromagnetic spectrum squeezed in between microwaves and the infrared. In a letter published recently in the online journal Nature Astronomy, Qizhou Zhang, an astrophysicist with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, writes that Dome A would be the perfect place to put a new radio telescope-one that operates in the little-studied terahertz frequency range. The fact that Dome A is so dry and high also makes the peak one of the most interesting places in the world to astronomers. That is less precipitation than Death Valley. Dome A receives less than an inch of precipitation in a typical year. Above you would be a broad blue disc of sky, usually unbroken by clouds. But most of that ice is over a million years old. If you were to stand on Dome A, the 1.8 miles of ice between the soles of your frozen shoes and the peaks of the buried mountains below would seem to contradict the idea that the place is a desert. An icy, white mountain top called Dome A, or Dome Argus, which also happens to be the highest point in Antarctica and possibly the best place on Earth to look back in time at how the universe formed. ![]() The coldest place in the world is a desert. ![]()
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