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Giant Magellan Telescope Poised to Answer Some of Humanity's Biggest Questions

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday March 14 2017, @04:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the are-the-questions-about-woodchucks? dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Located at the Las Campanas Observatory high in the Andes mountains of northern Chile, GMT [Giant Magellan Telescope] will be the world's largest astronomical telescope. The project is being developed by an international consortium of universities and research institutions in the U.S., Australia, Brazil, and South Korea.

GMT was designed to be a segmented mirror telescope that employs seven of today's largest stiff monolith mirrors as segments. Its six off-axis 8.4-meter segments will surround a central on-axis segment, forming a single optical surface 24.5 meters in diameter with a total collecting area of 368 square meters.

GMT is expected to be operational for many decades, enabling breakthrough science ranging from studies of the first stars and galaxies in the universe to the exploration of extrasolar alien worlds. Shelton believes that GMT has the potential to even revolutionize our understanding of astronomy.

"The GMT is poised to answer some of humanity's biggest questions about the nature of exoplanets and whether we are alone in the universe, about the beginning of the universe to understand the formation and evolution of the galaxies, about the origin of the chemical elements, and how black holes grow. The biggest discoveries that will be made by the GMT, however, will be the unexpected results that revolutionize our understanding of astronomy," Shelton told Astrowatch.net.

They may or may not put Jodie Foster in charge.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday March 14 2017, @06:38PM

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Tuesday March 14 2017, @06:38PM (#479048) Journal

    How many times do we have to mention adaptive optics? It's not a new concept.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_optics [wikipedia.org]

    An adaptive optics system tries to correct these distortions, using a wavefront sensor which takes some of the astronomical light, a deformable mirror that lies in the optical path, and a computer that receives input from the detector. The wavefront sensor measures the distortions the atmosphere has introduced on the timescale of a few milliseconds; the computer calculates the optimal mirror shape to correct the distortions and the surface of the deformable mirror is reshaped accordingly. For example, an 8–10 m telescope (like the VLT or Keck) can produce AO-corrected images with an angular resolution of 30–60 milliarcsecond (mas) resolution at infrared wavelengths, while the resolution without correction is of the order of 1 arcsecond.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Magellan_Telescope [wikipedia.org]

    The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) [...] is expected to have the resolving power 10 times greater than the Hubble Space Telescope

    Certain wavelengths penetrate the atmosphere better than others, and thus while a gigantic space telescope would be preferred, the cost/size advantage on the ground combined with the ideal wavelengths and corrective adaptive optics makes the ground telescope superior to the space one, for the moment.

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