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| Credit - Google || Image Taken From Pixabay |
For centuries, the Hubble Space Telescope has captured the hearts and minds of millions of people around the world. It has brought us images of far-off galaxies, close-up shots of planets orbiting other stars, and beautiful imagery of our own planet Earth. Now that you’ve seen these wonders with your own eyes, you may be wondering what else there is to see when looking up at the night sky. Today we’re going to answer that question by taking a look at the ten biggest telescopes in the world, how they work, and what they’re used for.
1) The Giant Magellan Telescope
The Giant Magellan Telescope is currently under construction at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. Once completed, it will be able to zoom in on objects roughly 500 times smaller than what can be seen by today’s most powerful telescopes. The GMT will boast a light-collecting surface 25 times larger than that of Hubble and eight times larger than that of its nearest competitor, ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope. These telescopes are so large because they use mirrors instead of lenses to focus light. A mirror focuses light using a principle called reflection, which means that when light strikes one side of a mirror, it bounces off and travels toward your eye (or camera). This makes them great for collecting lots of light from faraway objects—and seeing very faint things—but they aren't as good at getting high-resolution images. That's why you need such big mirrors! To get an idea of how much bigger these telescopes are compared with others, check out our infographic below. It compares some major telescopes' diameters (or apertures) with U.S. cities and landmarks.
2) Thirty Meter Telescope
The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) is a proposed optical telescope of 30 meters (98 ft) in diameter, equivalent to a 15-story building. The TMT is planned for construction on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. When complete, it will be one of three extremely large telescopes currently under construction—the others are the European Extremely Large Telescope and a second similar instrument being built by an international collaboration which includes Canada as a partner. It has been designed to produce images 14 times sharper than those produced by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, and would allow astronomers to study phenomena such as extrasolar planets. The TMT will complement other large telescopes nearby that are dedicated to submillimeter astronomy. Its scientific goals include imaging exoplanets, detecting galaxies near the edge of the observable universe, and studying dark matter. Its design is based on previous adaptive optics technologies developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Caltech Optical Observatories; these were used with success in ground-based telescopes since 2002 to correct image degradation caused by atmospheric turbulence using only modest amounts of hardware.
3) Large Binocular Telescope
The Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) has an aperture of 8.4 meters and a light-gathering power of 24 terapixels. The telescope was built jointly by two American universities, Arizona State University (ASU) and Ohio State University (OSU), as well as Italy's National Institute for Astrophysics, headquartered in Milan. The LBT saw first light on Dec. 22, 2005, with first useable data coming later that same year. In 2009, observations at LBT led to important insights into solar eclipses -- making it one of only five telescopes that can study total solar eclipses from start to finish. Besides astronomy research, the LBT is also used for biological research -- specifically plant photosynthesis investigations for agricultural applications.
4) Very Large Array
The Very Large Array (VLA) is a collection of 27 radio telescopes, each with a diameter of over 7 meters. The VLA, located near Socorro, New Mexico, was built in order to create high-resolution images of space. Since it uses sensitive radio telescopes, it can detect faint radio signals from galaxies that are billions of light years away from Earth. In addition to its ability to detect distant objects, it has also been used for other purposes such as tracking asteroids and studying quasars. It has even been used by NASA to track interplanetary spacecrafts as they approach Mars or Venus.
5) Hubble Space Telescope
The Hubble Space Telescope is one of NASA’s great successes—and it’s also one of its most valuable. Since 1990, it has completed 2,000 scientific studies that have benefited countless numbers of people on Earth. The telescope is currently operating at full capacity as we speak; however, there are plans to replace it with an updated version sometime in 2020. The original mission time for Hubble was about 15 years, but technology advancements will allow it to last another decade or so after that point.
6) Subaru Telescope
Construction on Subaru Telescope began in 1989, when it was known as Project Suprema. The telescope is located at an altitude of 2,700 meters (8,900 feet) on Mauna Kea – one of four Observatories managed by AURA for NASA. It consists of a single primary mirror with a diameter of 8.2 meters (27 feet), which can be expanded to 9.2 meters (30 feet). It’s equipped with three instruments, including Faint Object Camera/Spectrograph, Infrared Camera/Spectrograph and Near-Infrared Camera/Short-Wavelength Spectrometer. Its primary mission is to observe objects in space such as star formation regions and galaxies that are too faint to be seen by other telescopes.
7) Keck Observatory
There are several observatories on Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano on Hawaii’s big island. Of those, two telescopes bear the name Keck Observatory. One of them—the W.M. Keck Observatory—is actually made up of twin telescopes called Keck I and II (there is also a smaller telescope called Keck 3). Together, these two giants make up one of largest optical telescopes ever constructed. As large as they are, though, they still can’t compete with...
8) Chandra X-ray Observatory
The Chandra X-ray Observatory is a satellite, launched by NASA on July 23, 1999. The observatory was named after astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar who developed a mathematical theory that determined when stars would collapse or explode based on their mass. The Chandra X-ray Observatory was used to observe black holes, supernovas, neutron stars and galaxies in greater detail than ever before.
9) National Ignition Facility
The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is a large laser-based inertial confinement fusion (ICF) research device, located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), which is funded by the United States Department of Energy. The NIF is designed to be used as a research tool to create temperatures and pressures similar to those found inside stars and planets, including Earth itself.
10) Very Long Baseline Array
The Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) is a radio astronomy interferometer composed of ten radio telescopes ranging from Hawaii to New Hampshire. The array was designed to have a baseline length of 10,000 kilometers (6,200 mi), giving it very high resolution for studying both nearby objects as well as distant celestial objects such as quasars.