Spring Waxing Moon of the Southern Cross
Coquimbo, Chile 30 degrees 23 minutes S 71 degrees 49 minutes
Every body has their rock star pantheon. And their own places of pilgrimage.
Brian Schimdt is a rock star in my world and I visited his holy place today, high on Cerro Tololo at the Observatory there. I didn’t crawl up the 2000+ meters on my knees, instead I rode in a comfortable tour bus. Didn’t change the historic location or reduce my experience.
You may not have heard of Brian Schmidt and honestly I didn’t know his name, but I did know what he did at Cerro Tololo in 1999. He and a team of astronomers won a Noble prize for the work.
He used super novae IA, the glamor kids of the astronomical world, to change the perception of the fate of the universe. A pretty big deal.
IA super novae occur when a white dwarf drains matter from a twin red giant, then, literally, goes nuclear. Turns out these super novae have a predictable brightness which, thanks to spectrum analysis, makes it possible to accurately measure the composition of other stars. That spectrum analysis provides evidence for the speed of other objects in the universe.
It was Brian’s teams work, using this data, that shocked the astronomical and cosmological dogma. They found an expanding universe, not the collapsing one predicted by theories since Einstein, based on gravitational attraction. This left a huge puzzle.
What force could explain expansion? The answer to that question and one that followed in its train, dark matter and dark energy, pose the fundamental questions for cosmologists and astronomers over the next century.
What’s the big deal? Well, 90% of the matter universe seems to be dark matter and no one knows what it is. Ditto for dark energy.
All this work happened thanks to the four meter telescope at Cerro Tololo. The work continues and the basic questions posed by Schimdt’s team through data acquired with the 4 meter and confirmation of their results using the Hubble has set the agenda for astrophysics and astronomy for the foreseeable future.
Just up another Andean mountain road nearby is the Gemini observatory. A while back they decided to build an 8 meter telescope. Things went well with fund raising and plans had gotten well along until somebody remembered the tunnel. A while back the Elqui river got dammed. That took out the old road for a section and necessitated a tunnel. Which was not wide enough for an 8 meter mirror.
Oops.
The Gemini had to raise additional money to widen the tunnel. They did so and the 8 meter is now a reality.
The Elqui vallley, named after the river, starts high in the Andes and descends all the way to the Pacific where La Serena and Coquimbo, our port today and its sister city, sit. It has fertile soil, year round sunshine and plenty of water thanks to the reservoir.
Clementines, red and green table grapes, potatoes, tomatoes, lettuce, cabbage, custard apples and other unfamiliar fruits like the so-called papaya which is not a papaya but tastes pretty damn good anyhow all grow here and many of them end up on US and Chinese tables. There are also many wineries in the Elqui valley, some making the clear, brandy like distilled wine called Pisco, but others producing table wines.
Chile, Lonely Planet observed, has a European feel. Here in the Coquimbo/La Serena region the Mediterranean came to mind. Coquimbo climbs up a rocky hill and La Serena has preserved its colonial architecture. The orderliness of the agriculture and the housing in the towns reminded me of the Italian countryside. Not exactly, just in general feel.
Chileans love meat. The typical barbecue includes pork, beef, chicken and sausage, all of which ends up on your plate. We had lunch at a hosteria, a one floor hotel, and we had beef and chicken.
Gabriel Mistral, the first Noble laureate for poetry from Chile, was born in Vicuna, where we had lunch, and her tomb is in a small town further up the valley.
Tomorrow I plan to wander around Valparaiso since the dock will put me near the center of the lower town. Kate meanwhile will go on a tour that features Chilean wine and horses. A perfect fit for her interests.
