Balloon-borne Telescope Returns First Photos in Search for Dark Matter

upstart writes:

Helium is way cheaper than rocket fuel, and the pictures are just as good if you get high enough:

The world's first wide-field, balloon-borne telescope has begun returning images to Earth, with scientists keen to begin months of imagery to help investigate the existence of dark matter.

The Super Pressure Balloon-Borne Imaging Telescope, or SuperBIT, has returned two publicly-shared images so far: The one of the Tarantula Nebula in the header of this article, and a second of a pair of colliding galaxies known as "the Antennae."

SuperBIT's main scientific objective is to measure the properties of dark matter, a term given to the invisible-yet-mathematically-required quarter of the matter in the universe that we're unable to see or detect in any way other than its interactions with gravity.

The telescope, a collaboration between the University of Toronto, Princeton University, Durham University and NASA, lifted off from New Zealand on April 16, and was carried to an altitude of 33.5 kilometers (20.8 miles) by one of NASA's stadium-sized super pressure balloons. At that altitude, SuperBIT is floating above all but the last half-percent of the Earth's atmosphere, giving it a level of visibility that ground-based telescopes can't match.

Because it sits outside of most of the atmosphere, SuperBIT isn't limited by anything but the laws of optics, and is able to take images with resolutions as high as the Hubble Space Telescope. It's also the first balloon-borne telescope to be able to capture wide-field images.

"SuperBIT will test whether dark-matter particles can bounce off each other, by mapping the dark matter around clusters of galaxies that are colliding with neighbouring galaxy clusters," said the University of Toronto.

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