Even the most diligent stargaz-ers catch only a minute fraction of the supernovas, variable stars, and other rapidly changing phenomena; there is simply too much sky to cover. But two ambitious new projects seek to fill in that gap in our cosmic understanding.rnJonathan Grindlay, an astronomer at Harvard University, leads the Digital Access to a Sky Century at Harvard program, which will, digitize more than 500,000 glass plates-some showing as many as 100,000 stars-taken by telescopes around the world between 1880 and 1985. Then computer programs will sift through the huge database, looking at how quasars and gamma-ray bursts change over decades.
展开▼
