![]() "All the way back to 400 years ago, there was some patron that paid for Galileo's telescope and that started an incredible trend that forefront telescopes have almost always been privately funded," said UC's Bolte. While the Keck's funding history is convoluted, it eventually was built almost entirely with a single family's money. His fundraising skill was responsible for the Mount Wilson and Hooker telescopes, both world record holders. ![]() George Ellery Hale was a master of funneling astronomical amounts of private money - particularly from Andrew Carnegie - into astronomy projects. And when it comes to funding the world's largest telescopes, astronomers have often turned to philanthropists. With the technological challenges largely out of the way, what the new telescope projects need now is money. "With the Keck we can get images with a better spatial resolution than we can get with Hubble Space Telescope." We're like slaves to technologies," said Taft Armandroff, director of the Keck Observatory. "All this really depends on things like Moore's Law, fast computers, technology to change shape of mirrors. At that frequency, we can correct for turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere that occurs," said Peter Wehinger, staff astronomer at the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab, which is building mirrors for the Giant Magellan Telescope.ĭriven by faster and faster computers, the technology has allowed ground-based telescopes to rival and in some cases surpass the Hubble Space Telescope, and its future successor the James Webb Telescope. "Behind each magnet, there are a series of acoustic voice coils that can refresh the amount that that magnet is pulling at a rate of 500-1000 Hz. They hope that the new telescopes will see "first light," when the first stars formed out of the primordial universe's post-Big Bang mass. ![]() Second, by gathering more light than ever before, astronomers will be able to detect fainter objects that are further back in our universe's history. We will be able to determine how rare Earths are, and by extension, how likely Earth-like life is to exist elsewhere in the galaxy. These telescopes have two goals that could redraw our place within the universe, much as previous discoveries - like Edwin Hubble's discovery with a previous world-record holding telescope that the Milky Way was just one galaxy among many - redefined the centrality of our own galaxy.įirst, the telescopes will bring the study of Earth-sized planets around local stars within human reach. In the glacial world of large 'scope building, this is just around the corner. Now, the Giant Magellan Telescope at 24.5 meters, the Thirty Meter Telescope, and the 42-meter European Extremely Large Telescope are expected to be completed within a decade. ![]() In fact, Nelson's construction method and other segmented mirror designs have proven so flexible and scalable that three new telescopes that are more than twice the size of the world's current record-holder are preparing to leave the drawing board and enter the construction phase. The Keck inaugurated the next era of telescope building via segmented mirror or mosaic construction. This opened the way for the Mount Wilson Observatory's 1.5-meter telescope in 1908, the 2.5-meter Hooker in 1917, and the Hale telescope at Palomer in 1948. First, astronomers switched away from the lens-using refracting telescopes to mirror-based reflecting telescopes. Telescope design has seen two distinct periods in the last hundred years. It's really a breakthrough that seems obvious, but it wasn't." "The prototype was the first Keck 10-meter telescope. Nobody trusted that it could be done," Bolte said. "Everybody thought that was an extremely risky thing.
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