“First light” from world’s most powerful telescope announced

<body leftmargin="0" bgcolor="#000060" text="#FFFFFF" link="#FFFF00" vlink="#FF9900"> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="95%" height="1"> <tr> <center> <td valign="top" width="33%" height="33"> <b> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="5">“First light” from world’s most powerful telescope announced</font></p> </b> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="1">Oct. 26, 2005<br> Special to World Science<br> </font> <font size="2" face="Arial"> <b> <br> </b> </font> <b><font size="2" face="Arial">Astronomers today released the first image from a telescope designed to spy planets and the most distant galaxies in unprecedented detail.<br> <br> The Large Binocular Telescope on Mount Graham near Safford, Ariz., has “unique performance capabilities that no other set of telescopes can reproduce,” said Richard Green, director of the telescope project. <br> <br> </font><font size="2" face="Arial"> <p> Its strongest suit, Green said, is ability to see clearly in infrared light, a type of light with slightly less energy than visible light. This is ideal for seeing distant planets and galaxies at the edge of the observable universe, he added.<br> <br> The telescope is designed to collect light with two mirrors that combine the light. This produces an image sharpness equivalent to that of a telescope whose light collecting area is 23 meters wide, Green said, making it effectively the world’s biggest telescope. <br> <br> Only one mirror is operational so far, but the other is in place and should be working a year from now, according to the telescope’s developers. The instruments can also act as two separate telescopes.<br> <br> The combination will eventually provide the ability to see planets about the size of Jupiter in other solar systems, Green said. The smallest planets directly imaged with telescopes so far have been several times the size of Jupiter.<br> <br> The reason the telescope is most powerful for infrared light is that this is the range of light waves for which it’s easiest to make corrections to offset the atmosphere’s blurring of starlight, Green explained. The telescope has advanced instrumentations, known as adaptive optics, to make these corrections.<br> <br> The furthest-off galaxies also tend to emit infrared light, due to a phenomenon known as redshifting. The most distant galaxies are zooming away from us, and this stretches out the light waves they send our way. As visible light waves stretch out more and more, they tend to first become more red, then become infrared.<br> <br> Because the most distant galaxies give off light that takes billions of years to reach us, we see them as they were that many years ago. Thus, astronomers believe these are some of the first galaxies in the universe, and they can help reveal how these objects came to be.<br> <br> “We’ll be probing the early assembly of the first galaxies,” Green said. Among many astronomers, “the thought is that [galaxies] a re assembled from smaller pieces. This telescope will be able to resolve those pieces.”<br> <br> Planets also give off abundant infrared light. The difficulty with seeing planets is that the glare from nearby starlight often overwhelms them. <br> <br> The Large Binocular Telescope will be fitted in about three years with a system for reducing this glare, Green said. It works by combining light waves collected by the two mirrors so that the peaks and troughs of the light waves from a star cancel each other out, obscuring the star.<br> <br> The $120 million telescope, in development for two decades, is the fruit of an international collaboration that includes numerous astronomical and academic institutions in the U.S.A., Italy and Germany. These include the University of Arizona and Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics.</font></b> <font size="2" face="Arial"> <b><br> <br> * * *</b> <p><b><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#FFFFFF">Send us a <a href="mailto:editor@world-science.net">comment</a> on this story, or <a href="mailto:?Body=http://www.world-science.net/othernews/051026_binocfrm.htm">send it to a friend</a></font></b> </p> <p>  </center> </p> </td> </tr> </table> </body>