Pluto lecture turns to dark side

What was advertised as a lecture about the minor planet Pluto turned out Wednesday to be an talk about celestial dark matter and dark energy and a local observatory’s part in the search for them.

Trevor Weekes, director of the VERITAS project at nearby Mount Hopkins, said the local project will couple some of its research with that of soon-to-be launched Gamma-ray large space telescope, GLAST.

Dark matter and dark energy are invisible to most telescopes, yet they provide more than 50 percent of the material and energy in the universe. They can be detected by inference—how something else reacts to their invisible forces.

Weekes said dark matter, dark energy and their building blocks neutrinos seem to defy most known laws of physics.

“The Gamma-ray sky is different from our sky,” he said. In that sky are massive black holes, exploding stars and dark matter, most of which goes undetected by astronomers.

GLAST is scheduled to be launched in May by NASA.

At the Smithsonian headquarters at the base of Mount Hopkins, Weekes operates four large telescopes arrays, telescopes made of hundreds of mirrors that catch the light of disintegrating Gamma-rays. The Gamma-rays disintegrate when they encounter the upper atmosphere and emit Chrenkenov’s light, a faint light that’s captured on the telescopes mirrors.

By studying this decaying light, the scientist can infer their origin and properties of them.

Data from the Veritas telescopes will be shared with data from the GLAST space telescope.

At the beginning of the lecture, Weekes discussed the efforts by scientists in Flagstaff to track and elusive planet Pluto at the beginning of the 20th century.

It’s one of the smallest planets in the solar system, and two years ago, scientists declared that it is no longer a planet, but a minor planet.

As he opened is lecture, he showed cartoons of Walt Disney’s cartoon dog, Pluto, and then apologized to his listeners, saying he had brought them there under false pretenses.

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