Lighting Up The Past And The Future

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Lighting Up The Past And The Future

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By now pretty much all of you will have been bludgeoned with news of the Dwarf Star Gliese 581 and the planet c which whips around it like a racecar. But the discovery of an "earthlike" planet that may or may not be a hospitable environment for life overshadows the true significance of our ever-increasing ability to read light.

My father used to say that every problem can be solved by either a bigger hammer or more light. While the politicians swing their proverbial hammers scientists are lighting up not just the cosmic future, but also our cultural past.

Much of what we know about extrasolar objects comes to us because of astronomical spectroscopy - ostensibly, the reading of light. The composition of bodies such as meteors and exo-planets is determined by studying the light reflected by the planets, and the absorption lines, that minerals and gases create in that light.

But spectral analysis has uses other than trying to find Tom Cruise's long lost Zolob.

Read the rest of the article on the citizen-journalism website, Orato:

http://www.orato.com/node/2286