The main goal of building an observatory and launching it millions of kilometers from Earth or placing it on the highest mountains of our planet is simple: to understand the universe and our place in it. But where to begin with such a lofty task, where do we point our telescopes to unravel the great mysteries?
The sky seen through a professional telescope is very large. Let’s remember that in many cases we use the zoom in tool. To understand it, one piece of information is enough. Hubble’s iconic depth image was captured with 10 days of telescope time. Observing the celestial sphere with the same sensitivity would take a whopping 900,000 years. This is obviously not feasible. Choices must be made about where and how long to aim these magnificent instruments. To be efficient, we have to be smart.
The question is how to decide what is important or most important or what is most urgent to solve when we are trying to use resources as scarce as a telescope’s available time. The mechanism that almost all major international observatories have implemented is decision-making involving the entire scientific community. First, the observatories are responsible for selecting a panel of experts composed of members of the astronomical community who act as arbiters and judges. These individuals must demonstrate their integrity, explain any conflicts of interest that could bias the process, and in many cases remain anonymous.
The astronomical community is then invited to submit proposals. The terrestrial observatories, for example the one on the Roque de los Muchachos or the one on La Silla, usually do this twice a year: in autumn and in spring. Space observatories like HST or JWST do this once a year. And in the vicinity of these data, it is better not to ask an observing astronomer for anything, because he will be engaged in a frantic activity of calculations, estimates, contacts with colleagues and discussions, leaving little time for anything else, even theft a few hours of sleep. This month, for example, we won’t sleep well until the January 27 JWST proposal submission deadline. The idea is to come up with ambitious, clear and attractive proposals that are scientifically sound and have the ability to answer an important question to make them competitive. And despite the professionalism of the task, the observatories always show the same graphs: the vast majority of proposals are sent just before the deadline. We are human, although we contemplate the immensity.
The committee elected by the observatory reviews the submitted proposals and issues a rating based on the fundamentals of the importance of the science and the adequacy of the instrumentation for the task. Members prepare their reports independently and do not review their own proposals or those of their close associates. This creates a list of those who pass the exam and, of course, those who fail the exam. The success rate of this process is not very high, typically one out of seven, ten or twelve proposals is chosen depending on the year and the telescope. The selected proposals define not only the regions of the sky that will be searched for information, but also for how long and how. These will be the places that will help us expand our knowledge.
The process, despite its proven efficiency and the fact that it has been refined over the years, is not free from prejudice. Some are obvious and measured: selection processes harm women and young researchers. But others depend on the honesty of the reviewers evaluating the proposals, and great care is taken by the observatories to identify them, for example participating in proposals that directly compete with the science being evaluated.
A few years ago, NASA instituted a “double-blind” review system where neither the proponent nor the reviewer know who the other is. The idea was to try to break down the prejudices we all hold, consciously or unconsciously, despite our dedication to the noble art of rationality and objective measurements. Perhaps precisely because of professional deformation, the scientific community has been identified as one of the most reluctant to acknowledge its irrationalities. In fact, once this verification system is in place, it is measured that gender and other biases in evaluating requests for observing time in the Agency’s space telescopes have been eliminated. For example, some of the most successful suggestions come from astronomers who have not previously been granted observing time.
In this way, the observatories ensure the quality of the science that will come out of the telescopes. Last year, for example, the programs were selected that honored the approximately 6000 hours of time available to the scientific community at JWST or the 3000 Hubble orbits or the 180 nights of GRANTECAN. Observations of planets, disks, galaxies, supermassive black holes, active nuclei of galaxies, asteroids, comets that will help us understand the universe a little better and maybe, if we’re lucky, our place in it.
Cosmic Void is a section in which our knowledge of the universe is presented qualitatively and quantitatively. It aims to explain how important it is to understand the cosmos not only from a scientific point of view, but also from a philosophical, social and economic point of view. The name “cosmic vacuum” refers to the fact that the universe is and is mostly empty, with less than one atom per cubic metre, although paradoxically there are trillions of atoms per cubic meter in our environment, inviting us to wonder about our existence and to contemplate the presence of life in the universe. The section consists of Pablo G. Perez Gonzalezresearchers at the Center for Astrobiology; Patricia Sanchez Blazquez, Full Professor at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM); Y Eva VillaverResearchers at the Center for Astrobiology.
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