12/20/2023 0 Comments World big telescopeEd Stone, a Caltech physics professor and the executive director of TMT (not to mention former director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory), explains why scientists are pursuing a telescope more than three times the size of the biggest one currently on Mauna Kea: “If you want to see the very first stars in the universe,” he says, “you need a telescope of this class.” Keck has been able to observe a galaxy that existed about 570 million years after the Big Bang, but it just isn’t capable of observing the most distant stars, the first ones, which formed about 400 million years after the creation of the universe. Its massive mirror will be made from 492 segments and have 81 times the sensitivity of the Keck telescopes. In 2009, Mauna Kea was chosen as the site for the Thirty Meter Telescope, a mega-observatory proposed by the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and national science agencies in Japan, Canada, India, and China. But recently, Mauna Kea has become embroiled in a dispute that could radically alter the future of astronomy, and serve as a cautionary example of what we might lose if it keeps going down this path. Collectively, this baker’s dozen of observatories has dominated ground-based astronomy for four decades. Mauna Kea is best known as the home of the twin 10-meter Keck telescopes, which saw first light in the 1990s and remain two of the largest optical and infrared telescopes in the world. The oldest telescope on site, and still the smallest, is the University of Hawaii’s 2.2-meter (7.2-foot) UH88, built in 1968. At the summit, 13 telescopes sit along a ridge of formations that have built up around volcanic vents. It's made some of the most distant observations of water to date.The tallest island mountain in the world is Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, where the thin atmosphere and absence of light pollution create some of the best observing conditions for astronomers. It's the largest interferometer of its type in the world. This is something that is used, for example, with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), which uses 66 radio telescopes in Chile's Atacama Desert to do observations of the universe. One method of enhancing an individual telescope's collecting power is to pair it with others. Their discoveries include refining the Andromeda galaxy's size and nabbing the first picture of an exoplanet system. It has been used to examine comets and asteroids, exoplanets and even supernovas.Ĭlose behind are the twin Keck telescopes at Mauna Kea in Hawaii, which each have a diameter of 10 meters (33 feet). The largest optical reflector in the world is the Gran Telescopio Canarias in the Canary Islands, whose individual mirror segments create an equivalent light collecting surface to a 10.4-meter (34-foot) mirror. Wikipedia has a list of space observatories, but be sure to double-check the information there for authenticity. There are of course many space telescopes out there, but those are representative of some of the bigger ones. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope as seen during the second servicing mission to the observatory in 1997. The telescope will observe in infrared and have a 6.5-meter (21.3-foot) mirror, giving even higher resolution to our cosmic searches. Called the James Webb Space Telescope, it is expected to launch in 2018. While Hubble has helped us chart the universe's expansion and peered deep into time, a bigger NASA telescope is on its way. It has observed frantic star formation in galaxy clusters, spotted a molecule required for water in expiring stars like our Sun, and completed an immense cosmic dust survey. The European observatory launched in 2009 and has racked up several achievements since making it to space. The largest current infrared space telescope is Herschel, which has a 3.5-meter (11.5-foot) primary mirror. It has a 2.4-meter (7.9-foot) mirror that, along with other instruments, has allowed it to refine the age of the Cosmos and show that the universe's expansion is accelerating. Here are some of the monsters (present and future) of the astronomy world-and why their huge size really matters.Ī large optical telescope we we have in orbit right now is NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, which was launched in in 1990. We've been fortunate in recent years to see bigger and bigger telescopes on the drawing board.
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