By TAYLOR MORRIS, Student Reporter
The Society of Physics Students met in the science amphitheater on campus last Wednesday to discuss the recent discoveries of the SOFIA telescope and its correlation with the Hubble telescope.
SOFIA is an acronym for the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy.
According to the SOFIA science center website, the SOFIA is an 80/20 partnership of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), consisting of an extensively modified Boeing 747SP aircraft carrying a reflecting telescope with an effective diameter of 2.5 meters and it is based at the NASA Armstrong facility in southern California.
The SOFIA’s first science flight was in 2010 and during the seminar they showed one of the telescope’s initial discoveries. It was an infrared image of planet Jupiter that was then compared to same visible light image of Jupiter from the Hubble telescope.
According to Dr. Mary Riegel, Assistant Professor of Mathematics of the Northwestern Oklahoma State University, both the Hubble and the SOFIA are a great combination because scientists can overlay both images and retain even more information about stars, galaxies, and planets more than ever before.
There are several benefits to the use of the SOFIA telescope. According to Riegel, by putting a telescope in an airplane it can go above most of the gases in the atmosphere that cause interference with the telescope and then scientists have the opportunity to bring the telescope back down to do routine maintenance on it, unlike the Hubble that is expensively sent up into space and is stuck there.
Moreover, she added that the SOFIA project is partly designed as an outreach to give high school science teachers the opportunity to go up on the aircraft. This allows science teachers to not only be on the airplane, but also work with scientists and astronomers as well.
Students then have the opportunity to get involved through their teacher’s experience. Riegel believes that it is important for students of Northwestern to know more about the SOFIA.
“I think it’s important for them to know that we are still exploring. That there’s more to know and the more that we sort of gather data the better our understanding is and the more we can infer about our universe and what’s happening and that this is an ongoing process,” Riegel said.