If you check the post below this you’ll see that Prairie Dog film reviewer Jorge Ignacio Castillo has started a series of columns handicapping all the key contests in the upcoming Academy Awards.
Here’s a star story of another sort. If you check this CBC report you’ll learn that construction has started on a new $11 million radio telescope at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Facility near Penticton, B.C. Using components adapted from cellphones (specifically 2560 low-noise receivers spread out over a sizeable area), the telescope will gather cosmic radio waves from the northern half of the sky as seen from Earth and use the data to create a giant 3-D map of one-quarter of the observable universe.
Through the detection of Doppler shifts in light waves and other types of cosmic radiation, astronomers know that the universe is expanding, with millions of galaxies like the Milky Way (pictured above) moving away from each other at a rapid pace. Because some of the radio waves that the telescope will receive have been travelling for billions of years, the map that’s ultimately built will enable scientists to look back in time and discover what conditions looked like around the time of the universe’s creation which is currently calculated at 13.7 billion years ago.
