Pacific Grove >> Scientists say the world’s largest telescope will be able to gaze far into the universe, back to the time of the Big Bang.
It’s called the Giant Magellan Telescope, named after the first explorer to circumnavigate the Earth, and it’s under construction now. With its seven mirrors, measuring 82 feet in diameter, photos taken from the telescope will have 10 times the resolution of those taken from the Hubble Telescope, said Patrick J. McCarthy, director of the $1 billion project.
Magellan’s size will make the largest telescope available when McCarthy was growing up, in the 1960s and 1970s — the Mount Palomar Telescope — look like a dwarf at 5 meters in diameter.
This week the group behind Magellan, the GMT Community, is holding a community science meeting at Asilomar Conference Center. The meeting is titled, “Resolving Galaxies in the Era of Extremely Large Telescopes.”
Scientist are presenting papers, through Saturday, on such subjects as galaxy halos, Milky Way satellites and near field cosmology.
Magellan’s mirrors, each one 27 feet in diameter, are being built at the University of Arizona, one of the partners in the project. Three mirrors have been built and the fourth is underway. It takes about a year to grind and polish each mirror, which weigh 17 tons each. Magellan is expected to be fully operational by 2024.
The $100 million observatory will be built in Chile’s coastal Andes mountain range, where absolute darkness at night will allow perfect conditions for astronomers to study the heavens. The location is in Chile’s Atacama Desert, about 2 1/2 hours from the nearest town and an eight-hour drive from Chile’s capital, Santiago. The dome of the Magellan observatory will be 22 stories tall. Scientists will live on the mountain for a week at a time, then have a week off.
“It’s a really lively place to be,” McCarthy, an astrophysicist, said. “You can be there and do your work and everything else goes away.”
The observatory must be able to withstand high winds and earthquakes as large as 8-magnitude (Chile is quite seismically active).
“It’s a machine that has to do many things,” McCarthy said.
The GMT project began in 2003 when several universities got together and considered what it would be like to build a telescope with multiple mirror segments. Some $500 million has been raised for the project from private donations and international partnerships, including individual donations of $20 million and $30 million.
Astrophysics has come a long way, but with the Giant Magellan Telescope it will make a huge jump forward. Astronomers, McCarthy explained, have learned to deal with distortion from the Earth’s atmosphere during their work by removing red and infrared light waves. Magellan will be able to receive 10 times as many light waves across its aperture as the Hubble Telescope.
“It’s like noise-canceling headphones,” McCarthy said, “but it works for light rather than sound.”
What will GMT do for our daily lives?
“It will improve our lives in a big way,” McCarthy said. Much of the technology we enjoy today, he said, has come from physics and astronomy. “Life is so much more richer when you know about the world you live in.”
The first people to use Magellan will be those associated with the project. But McCarthy said he expects any scientist with a project approved by scientific groups will be able to use it.
Asked what he would first look at when Magellan goes live, McCarthy said he would point the huge telescopic eye at a place in the universe where nothing can now be observed and peer back as far as possible.
Scientists can now look at galaxies formed 1 million light years ago. Magellan will extend their ability to look at galaxies billions of light years ago, back to the Big Bang, approximately 13 1/2 billion years ago. They will be able to look back to a time when galaxies were very young and learn why they are shaped the way they are.
“It’s going to be a good era in astronomy in about 10 years, and going on for decades,” McCarthy said.
For more information about the Giant Magellan Telescope, visit t