© Instituto de Astrofísica de CanariasEarth's largest optical telescope, the Gran Telescopio Canarias, is closed due to COVID-19. Many others have also closed.
The alarm sounded at around 3 a.m. on April 3. An electrical malfunction had stalled the behemoth South Pole Telescope as it mapped radiation left over from the Big Bang. Astronomers Allen Foster and Geoffrey Chen crawled out of bed and got dressed to shield themselves from the -70 degree Fahrenheit temperatures outside. They then trekked a few thousand feet across the ice to restart the telescope.
The sun set weeks ago in Antarctica. Daylight won't return for six months. And, yet, life at the bottom of the planet hasn't changed much — even as the rest of the world has been turned upside-down. The last flight from the region left on Feb. 15, so there's no need for social distancing. The 42 "winterovers" still work together. They still eat together. They still share the gym. They even play roller hockey most nights.
And that's why the South Pole Telescope is one of the last large observatories still monitoring the night sky.
An Astronomy magazine tally has found that more than 100 of Earth's biggest research telescopes have closed in recent weeks due to the COVID-19 pandemic. What started as a trickle of closures in February and early March has become an almost complete shutdown of observational astronomy. And the closures are unlikely to end soon.
Observatory directors say they could be offline for three to six months — or longer. In many cases, resuming operations will mean inventing new ways of working during a pandemic. And that might not be possible for some instruments that require teams of technicians to maintain and operate. As a result, new astronomical discoveries are expected to come to a crawl.
"If everybody in the world stops observing, then we have a gap in our data that you can't recover," says astronomer Steven Janowiecki of the McDonald Observatory in Texas.
"This will be a period that we in the astronomy community have no data on what happened."Yet these short-term losses aren't astronomers' main concern.
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