WWW.ASTRONOMY.COM 35View from a frozen desert
There is one place on Earth where the star
remains visible throughout the Southern
Hemisphere winter: Antarctica. The winter
season keeps the frozen continent shroud-
ed in darkness, so from May to July, it is
the only land on Earth where the transit
can be viewed. Kalas reached out to
Chinese astronomers, who run a handful
of modest telescopes in Antarctica, and
they planned to observe the transit. He
also spoke with Tristan Guillot at the
Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in Nice,
France, about a telescope that had only
recently left the continent.
The Antarctic Search for Transiting
Exoplanets spent four years hunting for
exoplanets as they transited their faint host
stars before the telescope came home at the
end of 2013. But when asked, the French
group responsible for the 16-inch (40 cm)
instrument was willing to return it to the
southern continent.
“This system being so extraordinary,
IPEV, the French Polar Institute, was will-
ing to make a really important effort to
allow this telescope to be f lown back to
Antarctica,” says Guillot. “This is some-
thing really special.”
Operating in Antarctica isn’t without
its challenges. Standard electric cables
become as fragile as glass once tempera-
tures plunge to –58 degrees Fahrenheit
(–50 degrees Celsius), says Guillot, so you
have to be extremely careful with connec-
tions. And electronics and parts built to
withstand –4 F (–20 C) begin to have prob-
lems when they reach –112 F (–80 C), even
when heated.
While it rarely snows on the continent,
ice can form. The base sits on a plateau at
an elevation of 10,000 feet (3,000 meters),
and when the wind blows, it can carry ice
to cover the instruments. Frost and con-
densation are concerns, too. And any
technical problems must be resolved from
a distance. Only about a dozen people
remain on the base over the winter, and
they aren’t astronomers; they can fix any
mechanical issues, but they can’t address
scientific concerns.
“It’s not easy, but once you overcome
all that, then you have the reward of a
night that can be really, really nice with
extremely good conditions,” Guillot says.
While Antarctica was the only conti-
nent where Beta Pic was well placed
throughout the southern winter, it won’t
be the only site viewing the transit’s latter
stages. Telescopes in Chile and South
Africa were set to peer at the star after
August, once it put some distance between
itself and the Sun.
Kenworthy has built a ground-based
telescope just for the event. In January 2017,he installed the Beta Pic b ring camera —
bRing for short — on the African savanna
at the South African Astronomical
Observatory. About the size of a mini-
fridge, the telescope sits off to the side of
larger instruments, its camera eyes peering
toward the south. The scope takes an
image every six seconds, and three com-
puters inside the instrument crunch the
data before transmitting it back home. A
second bRing, supervised by Mamajek,
has been set up in Australia, and the two
should provide nearly continuous coverage
of the night sky. If a large series of exorings
exists within Beta Pic b’s Hill sphere, the
bRing team should know pretty quickly.
“We’re pretty sure we’ll see something,
but we’re not sure when we’ll see it or how
big the signal will be,” says Kenworthy.
This loose-knit band of astronomers
is working together, each on their own
individual projects, to reveal the secrets of
Beta Pictoris. “This is a worldwide effort,”
Kalas says. If one of the teams spots some-
thing unusual, it will immediately share
the news with everyone else, including
other astronomers who don’t have their
eyes trained on the bright young star.
They hope any find will galvanize even
more astronomers to turn their attention to
Beta Pic. “It’s quite an exciting and unusual
time,” says Kenworthy.Nola Taylor Redd is a freelance science writer
who writes about space and astronomy while
home schooling her four kids.Above: The owl-like eyes of the Beta Pic b ring
camera stare toward the southern sky, where
scientists hope they will pick up the telltale
signs of exomoons or exorings around the
massive planet. MAT THEW KENWORTHY (LEIDEN OBSERVATORY)
Left: The Beta Pic b ring camera operates from
the South African Astronomical Observatory.
Astronomers built the camera, which takes
an image every six seconds, to record any
moons or rings of the gas giant planet as
they pass in front of their host star.
MATTHEW KENWORTHY (LEIDEN OBSERVATORY)The 16-inch telescope of the Antarctic Search for Transiting Exoplanets
and its dome rest on the frozen desert of Earth’s southernmost continent.
This December 2016 view shows the instrument before it began its Beta
Pictoris observing campaign. DJAMEL MEKARNIA AND ABDELKRIM AGABI/IPEV/PNRA