May 14, 2008 -- Four hundred years after Galileo Galilei first used a telescope to peer at the night sky, the largest software company in the world rolled out a powerful tool for exploring the universe that makes going outside obsolete.
The project, called WorldWide Telescope, is intended to become a virtual watering hole where professional and amateur astronomers, planetariums, teachers, science writers, students and especially children can create and share their cosmic wanderings with like-minded souls, interested participants and online communities.
Like Google Sky, WorldWide Telescope, developed by Microsoft Research, uses images from premier observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Spitzer infrared Space Telescope, to provide tours of the night sky to anyone with access to a computer and the Internet.
The Microsoft project, unveiled Tuesday, adds interactivity by allowing users to develop and share journeys, which can be enhanced with original content, such as music, weblinks and photographs to supplement the 12 terabytes of available online data. The data is displayed so that selected targets appear in their actual relative positions.
"Where is Saturn in relation to the moon? Does the Milky Way really have a supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy? With the universe at your fingertips, you can discover the answers for yourself," said Curtis Wong, who headed the Microsoft group that created the software.
WorldWide Telescope, which is a free program, was developed in partnership with about a dozen universities, planetariums, research institutes, telescope operations centers, educational foundations and science media outlets.
Users choose which telescopes they want to use, the celestial targets (past, present and future) and the wavelength of light to explore. Objects that are very hot, for example, such as young stars, radiate stronger in ultraviolet wavelengths of light, rather than the visible. Planetary nebula, which often are draped in thick dust, illuminate powerfully in infrared.
"It's like the human genome project," said Johns Hopkins University physicist Alex Szalay, who helped develop the project. "It maps out the cosmos in all kinds of wavelengths. You can zoom in and out very easily. There is no other astronomical tool that even comes close."
Szalay told Discovery News he expects new discoveries will come from WorldWide Telescope users, similar to how a Dutch schoolteacher using online imagery in a project called GalaxyZoo made a major find of a ring-like structure in gas surrounding a galaxy. A distant quasar shining through the gas crated a blue glow, which previously had been dismissed as a camera artifact.
"This will make the process of making discoveries much easier because we will see if something is a little out of context," Szalay said. "It just makes it so easy, and so interactive -- and also so beautiful."
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