10 ASTRONOMY • AUGUST 2020
QUANTUM GRAVITY
The alarm sounded at around
3 A.M. on April 3. An electrical
malfunction had stalled the behemoth
South Pole Telescope as it mapped
radiation left over from the Big Bang.
Astronomers Allen Foster and Geoffrey
Chen crawled out of bed and got
dressed to shield themselves from the
–70-degree-Fahrenheit (–57 degrees
Celsius) temperatures outside. They
then trekked the few thousand feet
across the ice to restart the telescope.
The Sun set on March 22 in
Antarctica. Daylight won’t return until
six months later. Yet life at the bottom of
the planet hasn’t changed much — even
as the rest of the world has been turned
upside-down. The last flight from the
region left on February 15, so there’s
no need for social distancing. The 42
“winter-overs” still work together. They
still eat together. They still share the
gym. They even play roller hockey most
nights. And that’s why the South PoleTelescope is one of the last large observa-
tories still monitoring the night sky.
An Astronomy magazine tally in
April found that more than 120 of
Earth’s largest research telescopes
closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
What started as a trickle of closures in
February and early March became an
almost complete shutdown of observa-
tional astronomy. And the closures are
unlikely to end soon.
At the time of the tally, directors said
the telescopes could remain off line
for six months — or longer. In many
cases, resuming operations will mean
inventing new ways of working during
a pandemic. And that might not be pos-
sible for instruments that require teams
of technicians to maintain and operate.
As a result, new astronomical discover-
ies are expected to slow to a crawl.
“If everybody in the world stops
observing, then we have a gap in our data
that you can’t recover,” says astronomerSteven Janowiecki of the McDonald
Observatory in Texas. “This will be a
period that we in the astronomy commu-
nity have no data on what happened.”
Yet these short-term losses aren’t
astronomers’ main concern. Instead,
researchers worry about missing any
rare, one-and-done events that could
occur while observatories are shuttered.
“If we have our first bright supernova
in hundreds of years, that would be ter-
rible,” says astronomer John Mulchaey,
director of the Carnegie Observatories.
“But except for really rare events like
that, most of the science will be done
next year. The universe is 13.7 billion
years old. We can wait a few months.”CLOSING THE WINDOWS
ON THE COSMOS
Many of the shutdowns happened in
late March, as astronomy-rich states
like Arizona, Hawaii, and California
issued stay-at-home orders. Nine of the
10 largest optical telescopes in North
America shut down. The Hobby-Eberly
Telescope at McDonald Observatory
near Fort Davis, Texas, became the
largest optical telescope still scan-
ning the skies until May 19, when the
Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea,
Hawaii, opened its dome once more.
In Chile, an epicenter of observing,
the government placed the entire coun-
try under strict lockdown, shuttering
dozens of telescopes. Spain and Italy,
nations with extensive astronomical
communities — as well as a large num-
ber of COVID-19 infections — closed
their observatories, too.
Even many small telescopes closed,
as all-out shutdowns were ordered on
mountaintops ranging from Hawaii’s
Mauna Kea to the Chilean Atacama to
the Spanish Canary Islands. ScienceEARTH’S LARGEST TELESCOPES
CLOSE AMID COVID-19 OUTBREAK
More than 100 major telescopes shut down due to the
worldwide pandemic. What does that mean for astronomy?
CLOSED DOORS. Earth’s biggest optical
telescope, the 10.4-meter Gran Telescopio
Canarias, is one of over a hundred observatories
closed due to COVID-19. INSTITUTO DE ASTROFÍSICA DE CANARIAS