There is a problem looming on the horizon concerning how astronomers can continue to look at the sky as the effects of global climate change become more pronounced. Some of these issues are an extension of those that have been affecting amateur astronomers since the invention of telescopes. Fortunately for those with portable telescopes, many of the issues can be minimised, but some effects will be a problem for our larger observatories. And of course, for this website, we can gain an insight into what the problems are by gazing more closely at our coffee.
It’s time to make a hot coffee. Or a tea. In fact, for some of the following observations a cup of green tea or a herbal tea would be perfect. You are after a brew that is light and allows you to see through to the bottom of your mug. But if you want to keep with coffee, worry not, there are still important clues to be seen above the coffee (and you can always use the spare brewing water to pour plain hot water into a cold cup).
If you have made a tea, you should be able now to look into your tea to the bottom of the cup. If it is a sunny day, or if you have a light on behind you, you will hopefully be able to see lines of light starting to form and then dancing around the base of the cup. If you have made a coffee, this will be more difficult for you to see. In addition to pouring any spare brew water into a cup to see the same effect in plain water, you could also look at the top of your cup and notice how the steam is making the air above more turbulent, changing the way you see things on the other side of the mug (is there an allegory there?).
The dancing light patterns and turbulent steam clouds are similar to conditions in the atmosphere that can make observing the stars difficult for amateurs and professionals alike. It is perhaps easier at first to think about the keen amateur astronomer who takes their telescope from the warmth of their indoors to the cold of a cloudless night. We can perhaps immediately see analogues with the (hot) tea in the (cold) cup and the steam clouds above the coffee.
We can start by thinking about the turbulence in the air movement of the atmosphere being similar to the turbulence in the steam clouds above the cup. It is hard to focus on point objects through the steam clouds; the star light twinkles as it travels through our atmosphere. But then, just as we see the light patterns form in our tea cup as regions within the tea that have ever-so-slightly different temperatures mix in a convective pattern, so the hot air within the tube of the telescope will mix with the air at the edge of the tube that has been cooled by contact with the night-temperatures. The refractive index of air and water varies as a function of temperature (fluid density). And so with the telescope as with the tea cup, these regions of hotter and cooler fluid (air and tea respectively) have different refractive indices, meaning that any light travelling through those regions gets bent by different amounts as a function of the temperature of the medium it flows through. In the tea cup, this means that we see bright lines dancing across the bottom of the cup that trace the convection zones in the tea. In the telescope we would get a wobbly image.
For the amateur with their portable telescope the solution to the convection problem, if not the atmospheric turbulence, is relatively simple. Take your telescope outside for a good amount of time so that the air inside the tube can reach a similar temperature to the air outside. Convection will subside and the image will be more stable. If we wanted to drink cold tea, we could see the same thing with our tea cup: leave the tea to cool to room temperature and those dancing light lines on the bottom of the cup should subside (this is admittedly a thought experiment on my part. I have generally finished the tea before reaching this point).
But unfortunately, similar phenomena also affect professional observatories, and a recent study suggests the problems are likely to get worse as the effects of global climate change become increasingly apparent. One of the first problems is exactly the same as for the portable telescopes: the telescopes are frequently warmer than their surroundings. Observatories such as the European Southern Observatory facility in Cerro Paranal, Chile, have in the past compensated for this by cooling the domes housing the telescopes during the day to match that of the air outside. The problem is that the feedback circuits do not work to cool to a temperature higher than 16C and, as the atmospheric temperatures rise, so it becomes harder to maintain the temperature equilibrium between the telescope and the atmosphere. As the atmosphere becomes warmer, it also becomes more turbulent, causing further problems for observations done with ground based telescopes.
More difficult however is the effects of water vapour in the atmosphere for observations being made in the infra-red. As the atmospheric temperature increases, so the water vapour content in the atmosphere will increase. One measure of the water vapour in the atmosphere is known as the integrated water vapour (IWV). The IWV is the total water vapour in a column of air stretching vertically from the Earth’s surface to the top of the atmosphere. High IWV levels affect observations in the infra-red and are particularly frequent during El Nino events. It is not just that climate change will cause there to be, on average, more water vapour in the atmosphere. It is known that the frequency of El Nino events is increasing as a consequence of the effects of the climate change we are already seeing. This will lead to more frequent occasions when the observing conditions are unfavourable for ground based telescopes.
The authors of the study conclude that we will need to think about the effects of climate change on the local conditions before we can build any new ground based observatories. We will need to adapt to the new conditions that climate change forces on us. As to how we can minimise the effects of climate change altogether, that will require gazing into our coffee and tea and thinking a lot more deeply. There are things we can do, individually and collectively. Is it too much wishful thinking to wonder if we will start to do them in 2021?