What information does a spectrometer yield that telescopes cannot?

Question

Any help would be much apprecited. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Spectrometers break up the light like a prism, letting us see how much light is coming from the source in each wavelength. You could in principle do the same thing with a telescope and a large set of narrow-band filters, but that would take a really long time.

Answer 2

The HST has been used to produce some excellent images of the four main gas giant planets of our Solar System. I've just spent a couple of minutes to do a Google search and found plenty. Neptune is the furthest of the gas giants and beyond this there is nothing of any major significance to justify aiming the HST at. The main purpose of the HST is, and always has been, to study the much more distant Universe of galaxies and galaxy clusters. All the instruments designed for use on the HST have been accordingly designed with this purpose in mind. Because there is such a huge difference in the brightness between the planets and distant galaxies, if you were to try and take an image of Jupiter say with a camera which is designed to take images of very faint and distant galaxies over a period of a few days, you would most like destroy the camera. With conventional telescopes such as those used by amateurs, we can see both brighter and much dimmer objects. Professional telescopes on the other hand, and in particular telescopes in orbit are much more specialised and the cameras used with them are designed to image much more specialised targets. Even in amateur astronomy, when imaging objects you have to used the most appropriate type of telescope and camera to suit the brightness and size of the object you want to image.

Answer 3

Hi. Most spectrometers are already connected to a telescope. It shows line of emission and absorption. These correspond to light emitted by or absorbed by different elements. This can show the chemical makeup of a star for instance or what lies between the star and us.

Answer 4

a spectrometer shows the wavelength of the light, it is used to help show that the universe is expanding. telescopes focus light from a distance and make objects look upclose

Answer 5

You might recall that optical telescopes need a minimum resolution to differentiate between two objects a small distance apart. Similarly, for a spectrometer to be useful, it must possess a minimum spectroscopic resolution in order to distinguish between spectral lines.
Spectroscopic resolution, also referred to as frequency resolution, is simply a measure of a spectrometer's ability to differentiate between two spectral lines with a small difference in frequency. For instance, in order for a spectrometer to resolve two spectral lines separated by 10Hz, it must possess a frequency resolution equal to or below this frequency.

Answer 6

It tells us what elements are present at the object being observed. Each element and compound has a unique spectrographic thumbprint. If you look at a spectrograph, you can use it to determine what's there (elements in an atmosphere, or what elements are present in a star).

That's how they discovered helium, actually. They later produced it on Earth and saw that it had the same spectrographic signiature as what they found on the Sun.