One of my favourite astronomy memories dates from the mid-1990s. I had gone out to the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii to measure the brightness of some high-redshift radio galaxies—a worthy but routine piece of science—and discovered that they were fainter than expected. This may not sound terribly interesting, but it was exciting for me and the other 100 or so scientists around the world who care about these objects. My memory, however, is of what happened after the observing run. During the night, we received an email that the space shuttle was due to pass over Hawaii. Just before dawn we went out of the telescope dome to watch. I had been expecting the shuttle to look something like a plane, but instead a bright point of light shot upwards at a crazy angle, crossing the sky in a couple of seconds, an upside-down meteor hurled towards the gods.
With time, this memory has come to stand for a big shift in my discipline. The space shuttle involved hundreds of collaborators and budgets of millions. As for my project, apart from the telescope operator, I was observing by myself, and the only other person involved was my friend Steve Rawlings, who was at home in Oxford. How things have changed in ten years. The global astronomy community has now just finished applying for observing time on the Herschel Space Observatory, a €1bn project due to be launched by the European Space Agency in early 2009. Last autumn, after finally submitting my own proposal, I counted the number of collaborators on it. There were 101. In ten years, astronomy has gone from a multitude of small-scale projects to Big Science schemes like Herschel.
One reason for this is the development of cameras and other instruments capable of observing large chunks of the sky in a single shot. It now makes sense to get together a large team who will carry out a large survey that can then be used for multiple projects. My own Herschel programme is a good example. Herschel will operate in the submillimetre waveband—the region of the electromagnetic spectrum between the infrared and radio wavebands—in which the universe is still largely unexplored, and so there is a good chance that our survey will discover something unexpected. But the data will also be used for many different projects, ranging from the study of protostars to galaxy evolution. Another reason for the change to this kind of big international project from the old-style small-scale projects is the revolution that has occurred in our understanding of the universe in the past ten years.
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