Researchers have developed a new telescope, Giant Magellan Telescope, that will provide 10 times sharper resolution and better picture of the space objects than the Hubble Space Telescope.
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Astronomers at the University of Arizona, the Arcetri Observatory near Florence, Italy, and the Carnegie Observatory have developed a new type of camera that allows scientists to the sharpest images of the night sky than ever before. Researchers gave been developing this technology for the last 20 years and has now deployed the latest version of news cameras in the high desert of Chile at the Magellan 6.5-meter telescope.
The twofold improvement over past efforts rests on the fact that for the first time, a telescope with a large diameter primary mirror is being used for digital photography at its theoretical resolution limit in wavelengths that the human eye can see.
"It was very exciting to see this new camera make the night sky look sharper than has ever before been possible. We can, for the first time, make long-exposure images that resolve objects just 0.02 arcseconds across – the equivalent of a dime viewed from more than a hundred miles away. At that resolution, you could see a baseball diamond on the moon," said UA astronomy professor Laird Close, the project's principal scientist.
The images taken by Giant Magellan Telescope will be at least twice as sharp as those coming from the Hubble Space Telescope, which produced the best images in visible wavelengths. Scientists say this is possible because with its 21-foot diameter mirror, the Magellan telescope is much larger than Hubble with its 8-foot mirror.
"As we move towards shorter wavelengths, image sharpness improves. Until now, large telescopes could make the theoretically sharpest photos only in infrared – or long wavelength – light, but our new camera can take photos that are twice as sharp in the visible light spectrum," said Jared Males, a NASA Sagan Fellow at the UA's department of astronomy. ■