Construction to Begin on Giant Magellan Telescope

 

Source: GMTO

How to shut off starlight and directly see exoplanets

An advanced telescope imaging system that started taking data last month is the first of its kind capable of spotting planets orbiting suns outside of our solar system. The collaborative set of instrumentation and software, called Project 1640, is now operating on the Hale telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California after more than six years of development by researchers and engineers at the American Museum of Natural History, the California Institute of Technology, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

Two images of HD 157728, a nearby star 1.5 times larger than the Sun. The star is centered in both images, and its light has been mostly removed by the adaptive-optics system and coronagraph. The remaining starlight leaves a speckled background against which fainter objects cannot be seen. On the left, the image was made without the ultra-precise starlight control that Project 1640 is capable of. On the right, the wavefront sensor was active, and a darker square hole formed in the residual starlight, allowing objects up to 10 million times fainter than the star to be seen. Images were taken on June 14, 2012 with Project 1640 on the Palomar Observatory's 200-inch Hale telescope. Credit: Project 1640

A brief outlook on E-ELT's wonders

By 2020, ground- and space-based facilities will have discovered thousands of massive (Neptune- and Jupiter-mass) exoplanets. ... The next step in exoplanet research will be the physical characterisation of the then known planets.

Left: The most massive globular cluster in the Milky Way: Omega Centauri, ~ 30 light-years across, potential host of a 10 000 solar-mass black hole to be confirmed with the E-ELT. Right: Simulated mid-infrared image of a massive young star cluster at the distance of the Galactic Centre. The cluster is heavily obscured and reddened by dust, causing up to 200 magnitudes of extinction in the visual. The E-ELT will be able to resolve stars in deeply dust-extincted regions and in other stellar systems out to distances of 55 million light-years. Credit: The E-ELT Project office / ESO

E-ELT, the future largest telescope in the world

ESO’s governing body, the Council, met on June 11, 2012, at the ESO Headquarters in Garching, Germany. The main topic on the agenda was the start of the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) Programme — the world’s biggest eye on the sky. The E-ELT will be a 39.3-metre segmented-mirror telescope sited on Cerro Armazones in northern Chile, close to ESO’s Paranal Observatory.

Artist's impression of the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) in its enclosure on Cerro Armazones, a 3060-metre mountaintop in Chile's Atacama Desert. The 39.3-metre E-ELT will be the largest optical/infrared telescope in the world — the world's biggest eye on the sky. Operations are planned to start early in the next decade, and the E-ELT will tackle some of the biggest scientific challenges of our time. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada