Long Nights, 90 Below. What More Could Astronomers Want?

It’s been called the whitest place on Earth, and at 90 degrees below zero, it could be the coolest place on the planet for astronomy.

And so 17 Chinese astronomers, engineers and technicians boarded an old icebreaker last November, crunched into a harbor in East Antarctica and then set off on a 20-day, 1,000-mile trip across the snows to establish a new observatory at the bottom of the world. The observatory is called Plato, for the Plateau Observatory. For now it consists of a collection of boxes and towers holding seven small telescopes and cameras on a bump known as Dome Argus, which is 13,000 feet high and about 700 miles east of the South Pole. For the next year they will hold vigil alone, reporting by satellite radio through the long Antarctic night, but these instruments are the vanguard of great hopes.

Within five years, if all goes according to plan, this frigid mound of snow will be a humming scientific base staffed by humans, home to a fleet of world-class telescopes searching for planets around other stars, probing the internal structures of stars and keeping watch for the violent supernova explosions in which the brightest stars end their lives and by which astronomers gauge the effects of dark energy on cosmic history.

The Antarctic Plateau, of which Dome Argus is the highest point, is blessed with exceptionally dark, dry and calm air. It is the coldest and driest place on Earth, making it “nearly as good as space” as an observing site, explained Lifan Wang, an astronomer at Texas A&M and director of the newly established Chinese Center for Antarctic Astronomy.

“With a telescope at Dome A,” he said in a news release from Texas A&M, “it is possible to achieve near-space-quality images at a much lower cost than launching a telescope into space.”

Astronomers rate observation sites in terms of the sharpness of star images, which are blurred and diluted by atmospheric turbulence. The relative sharpness of the images at Dome A — the “seeing” in astronomical terms — means, Dr. Wang explained, that a small telescope down there can see as much as a larger one at other sites.

For example, a telescope 4 meters (160 inches) in diameter at Dome A would be equivalent in some ways, like the ability to resolve detail, to a 12-meter-diameter telescope someplace else. Such an instrument, which Dr. Wang and his colleagues hope to have at Dome A by around 2014, would be a cosmological workhorse, helping to investigate the dark energy that is speeding the expansion of the universe. The biggest optical telescope on Earth today is 10.4 meters in diameter, although there are plans for bigger ones on the drawing boards.

Not to mention the advantage of nights that are four months long, allowing continuous monitoring of every quirk and burp in the South Polar sky.

Carl Pennypacker of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California said the point of the new observatory was not to compete with the space program, but rather to “grab low-hanging fruit.”

“We can’t replace space,” Dr. Pennypacker said, adding that some things are faster and cheaper on the ground. “We can keep momentum going on key scientific projects.”

The new observatory owes its existence in large measure to China’s ongoing effort to expand in science. “We’re piggybacking on the Chinese,” Dr. Pennypacker said, noting that the country’s research budget is growing by leaps and bounds. Astronomy has a venerable history in China, but the country lacks high-quality observing sites.

Attention was riveted on the Antarctic plateau four years ago, when tests showed that the seeing was surprisingly superb at a place called Dome Charlie, where French and Italian astronomers had set up a small base.

Early in 2005, a Chinese expedition led by Li Yuansheng of the Polar Research Institute of China became the first to scale Dome A, the highest point on the plateau. Because it is higher, calculations suggested that the seeing should be even better on that dome.

In June of that year, Dr. Wang, who was born and educated in China, and Xiangqun Cui, the director of the Nanjing Institute of Astronomical Optics Technology, organized an international conference in Beijing to decide how to exploit this new spot.

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