Telescope to be mounted in Nunavut’s high Arctic

Astronomers plan to install a planet-hunting telescope in the High Arctic next winter. It will be close to the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory, shown here, on northern Ellesmere Island. The polar lab will provide access to electricity and the Internet for the telescope that will search for potentially habitable planets orbitting stars other than our own. (HANDOUT)

MARGARET MUNRO
Postmedia News

An enterprising team of astronomers is set to lug a telescope to the High Arctic, lubricate it with special low temperature grease and set up shop on Ellesmere Island.

They say the island -the last big chunk of land before the North Pole -looks like it could be the best place on Earth to see the universe.

“It’s almost like being in space,” says astrophysicist Eric Steinbring, who has been checking out the view from mountaintops on the northern edge of Ellesmere.

The “super-seeing” potential is so remarkable that he and his colleagues believe Ellesmere could put a Canadian site in the astronomical big leagues.

The Arctic mountaintops appear to be as good, if not better, than the Hawaiian and Chilean sites now home to large worldclass telescopes. And the view might be comparable to the Hubble Space Telescope.

“It looks that good,” said Steinbring, of the National Research Council’s Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics, who is echoed by his colleagues at the University of Toronto and University of B.C.

They dream of one day stationing a multimillion-dollar telescope on a remote Ellesmere mountaintop. And in a modest step in that direction, they are now racing to get a $100,000 telescope operating on the island by next winter, adding a new and decidedly chilly twist to Canadian astronomy.

Astronomer Nicholas Law says the Ellesmere telescope is to spend the “wonderfully” long and dark Arctic winter looking for potentially habitable planets. He is putting the telescope together at the University of Toronto’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, which is financing the project with federal labs and granting councils.

Law says the project is different than other planet-hunting operations, which concentrate on larger stars. The Ellesmere telescope will survey stars as small as a 10th the size of our sun, which are believed to harbour plenty of small planets.

“We have the possibility of detecting rocky planets on which liquid water could exist,” Law said.

He said the long Arctic winter -the sun sets in October and doesn’t return until March -is ideal for planet hunting. The telescope will be able to stare at stars around the clock for days, if not weeks, because the sun won’t come up to hinder the view.

The notion of heading for the Arctic was prompted by the realization in 2004 that Antarctica offered excellent potential for stargazing.

“We said ‘Well, surely the Arctic is just as good,'” said Raymond Carlberg at the University of Toronto. He is co-leading the project with Steinbring and Paul Hickson at UBC.

After a search in the map room at the University of Toronto, Carlberg dispatched a graduate student to Ellesmere in 2006 “to stand on those mountains and start taking measurements.”

Field tests, done over three years, show that Ellesmere’s mountaintops are superior to Antarctica. The mountains, some almost 2,000 metres high, are well above weather inversions and atmospheric turbulence that makes stars twinkle but interferes with astronomical observations, says Carlberg.