YOLA 07B: Stars in Their Eyes - all

carpet
Noun a thick covering
carpet
It is dawn in the Andes. A grimy carpet of red dust stretches over rolling featureless hills towards a horizon dominated by the icy cone of Chile's Licancabur volcano.
puny
Adjective small and weak
puny
There are no trees, no bushes, not even a blade of grass in this lifeless landscape. Even the atmosphere is alien. At 5,000 metres above the sea, oxygen levels are puny.
arid
Adjective extremely dry
arid
Move suddenly, and bright spots blur your vision before you start to stagger and retch. This is Chajnantor, the most inhospitable portion of Chile's Atacama desert, and one of the world's most arid places.
negligible
Adjective very small or unimportant
negligible
The annual rainfall here is negligible - a few drops of moisture scattered yearly on desiccated, empty land. You wouldn't last a day unprotected in this dead zone.
hostile
Adjective unfavorable to life or growth
hostile
Chajnantor is hostile, threatening, and in a few years is destined to provide astronomers with a new home.
microwave
Noun an electromagnetic wave with a 0.001–0.3 m wavelength, shorter than a normal radio wave
microwave
It sounds extraordinary. Nevertheless, the European Southern Observatory has committed itself to begin building an array of giant microwave receivers on Chajnantor.
recess
Noun a dark, hidden place or part
recesses
When completed, these machines will allow the world's astronomers to view the birth of thousands of planetary systems in the deepest recesses of our galaxy.
obscure
Verb to hide or cover something
obscured
The planetary systems are in the deepest recesses of our galaxy and probe the early universe's 'Dark Ages', when dust obscured the cosmos and the first stars flickered into existence. Unique knowledge is expected to flow from
extend
Verb to stretch out over a distance
Extending
Each Alma receiver will consist of a transportable structure supporting a dish measuring 10 metres in diameter. Extending outwards from the smooth metal surface of the dish will be 3 support arms that hold a sub-reflector.
amplify
Verb to increase the strength of an electric signal
amplified
The dish will direct the radio waves down into the heart of the receiver, where signals from deep space can be amplified, recorded and analysed. To compensate for the rotation of the Earth, it will need to be fully steerable.
rotate
Verb to move or turn in a circle
rotating
To vary the angle of the dish, it will be mounted on an elevation structure, beneath which will be a rotating structure. This will move smoothly around on the steel base, the cylindrical platform for the receiver.
daunting
Adjective very difficult to do or deal with
daunting
The construction of 64 such telescopes on a vast, adjustable grid of tracks covering 40 square km is daunting. The combined collecting surface of the receivers will measure 6.000 square metres, the size of a football pitch.
mammoth
Adjective very large
mammoth
Putting together such a mammoth piece of kit, with its ?250 million price tag, in the thin air and red dust of the central Chilean Andes, seems outrageously ambitious.
faint
Adjective not clearly seen
faint
But why bother? Given that the night sky is full of bright galaxies, why do astronomers build telescopes manufactured to a billionth of a metre accuracy, just to see faint ones? The answer is about looking back in time.
finite
Adjective having limits
finite
Astronomer David Field of the University of Aarhus says, "The fainter the galaxy, the more distant it is. And given that light travels at a finite speed, faint galaxies are also the oldest."
fluid
Adjective used to describe something that can change easily or that changes often
fluid
"We want to know how a hot, fluid universe turned into one with galaxies and stars and planets and continents and. eventually, people," says UK astronomer Dr Paul Murdin.
evolve
Verb to change or develop slowly often into a better, more complex, or more advanced state
evolved
Field continues, "In other words, telescopes are time machines. They have shown us what the universe was like ten billion years ago, how it evolved during its childhood."
infancy
Noun an early stage of development
infancy
Scientists are now satisfied they know about the universe's birth, and about its childhood. But they still need to learn about its early infancy thirteen billion years ago.
coalesce
Verb to come together to form one group or mass
coalesced
After the newly-born cosmos had exploded into existence and the heavens had filled with superheated particles, a thin gruel of matter somehow coalesced to produce heavy solid objects.
photon
Noun a tiny particle of light or electromagnetic radiation
photons
"We want to know how the heavens got structure. In short, we want to understand how we got from the Big Bang to human beings." One answer is to build bigger optical telescopes to gather photons from more distant galaxies.
radiation
Noun energy that comes in the form of in the form of waves or rays you cannot see
radiation
However, really distant, and therefore older, galaxies recede from us so rapidly that much of their light is transformed - by an effect known as the Doppler shift - into microwave radiation.
cosmological
Adjective concerning the scientific study of the origin and development of the universe
cosmological
Chajnantor's receivers will be built specifically to collect this precious microwave radiation and help astronomers understand one of science's last major cosmological mysteries: the structured, solid nature of the cosmos.
observatory
Noun a building scientists use to study and watch the sky
observatory
But collecting microwave radiation has one major drawback, as Esteban Illanes of the European Southern Observatory, explains. 'It is absorbed by water. An observatory at sea level would pick up nothing.
absorb
Verb to draw in energy
absorbed
"All the microwaves coming down from space would have been absorbed by clouds or water vapour in the atmosphere before they reached our instruments. That is why we picked Chajnantor," says astronomer Dr. Murdin.
exploit
Verb to get value or use from something
exploiting
Chajnantor is high and dry - perfect for picking up microwaves. This selection is also particularly appropriate, for mankind has been exploiting the aridity of the Atacama desert for millennia.
mummification
Noun the process of drying corpses to preserve them
mummification
Atacama desert is the place where mummification -- the process of drying corpses to preserve them -- began.
solidity
Noun the quality or state of being firm and stable in shape
solidity
Now, the special conditions that made mummification possible are giving scientists a chance to explain how the universe acquired the solidity that made life possible in the first place. It will be a key scientific milestone.
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