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Tuesday August 18, 2009
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The Hubble Space Telescope has amazed the public with thousands of images over the past two decades. That's partly due to its location in orbit, away from the distorting effects of Earth's atmosphere that make stars twinkle--pretty, but a royal pain for doing science.
Now a new crop of ground-based telescopes will employ a new cancellation mechanism to counter the twinkling of stars and other unwanted "seeing" effects, as they're called. As CNN reports, the telescopes will show what the universe was like when it was just a few hundred million years old and emerging from a period of total darkness after the Big Bang.
"[We'll be] looking at the first generation of stars forming in the universe, which is kind of a cool idea: The time when the lights went on in the universe. There was no light before that time," said Daniel Fabricant, associate director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in the report.
Among the new devices is the Giant Magellan Telescope (pictured), which will have a primary mirror 80 feet across (25 meters), or more than double the world's largest telescopes today. The Thirty Meter Telescope in Hawaii will be even larger, while the European Extremely Large Telescope (love the name) will be 137 feet in diameter. All three telescopes are due to begin operation in 2018.
All three new telescopes will feature adaptive optics, which correct the "wiggling" of the Earth's atmosphere. The idea is to shoot laser beams into the sky in order to create fake stars, monitor how the atmosphere distorts their appearance, and then correct for that hundreds of times per second, according to the report. Amazing stuff. (Image credit: GMT/Todd Mason)
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August 18, 2009 5:19 PM
I'm really REALLY interested in this adaptive technology. When I was in school, we were being told that it'd be faster and cheaper to put more telescopes in orbit and build telescopes on the far side of the moon (far away from any atmospheric interference) before this kind of adaptive technology would be reasonable.
I mean, after all, seeing effects are nothing to be discounted - any gaseous turbulence, motion, or obstruction in the atmosphere account for the standard twinkling you see on a clear night, and then you have other things like light pollution and plain old everyday clouds to contend with!
While I'm sure these telescopes can't compensate for cloud cover, being able to adapt to gaseous turbulence in the atmosphere is impressive by itself!
August 19, 2009 12:18 AM
Let's all remember that there was NO one Big Bang. There have been, are being and will be a number of Big Bangs in this infinite Universe of ours. However, what we are starting to see are the consequences of OUR Big Bang with the new modern telescopes. Will humankind ever be able to see the OTHER Big Bangs which have taken place, are taking place and will take place? A good question for many scientists.