Super Telescope in Chile under construction

[lpetrich]

The Giant Magellan Telescope Will Revolutionize Astronomy With a 119-Ton Mirror

The Deep Space Eye in the Desert

To be housed in a building 22 stories high, on a plateau of the Atacama Desert of Chile, the Giant Magellan Telescope will be the largest optical telescope ever built.

The beginning of telescope operations, known as first light, is planned for 2023 and will use just four mirrors. The first observations with all seven mirrors will follow in 2025.

These mirrors will have diameter 8.4 m (27.6 ft), and the article describes how they were made.

The mirrors are being cast and shaped at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Arizona's lab has made mirrors for some of the most powerful telescopes on the planet, including the twin 6.5-meter mirrors for the Magellan Telescopes in Chile, the 8.4-meter ones for Arizona's Large Binocular Telescope (LBT), and the 8.4-meter mirror for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), an ambitious project to take 1,000 pairs of exposures of the night sky with a 3.8-gigapixel digital camera, the largest in the world.

Since the six outer mirrors are off-axis, getting them to be the right shape will be especially challenging.

There are even bigger telescopes in the works.

Other large ground-based telescopes—such as the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) planned for construction on the volcano Mauna Kea in Hawaii and the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) which will live to the north of GMT in Chile—will have even larger primary mirrors than the Giant Magellan Telescope. These two telescopes, however, will use hundreds of hexagonal mirror segments that are each about a meter and a half across (492 segments for the TMT and 798 for the EMT), rather than seven gargantuan monolithic mirrors like GMT.

What might we use such a big telescope for? To observe exoplanet transits to see if those exoplanets look larger or smaller at different wavelengths. Finding such differences will indicate the presence of an atmosphere and give clues to its composition. If an atmosphere contains molecular oxygen, it may have been produced by oxygen-releasing photosynthetic organisms, much like Earth plants and algae.

 

[bilby]

Hmm. GMT might be a confusing acronym, as it's already used or Greenwich Mean Time.

They should change it to Ultralarge Telescope Chile, or 'UTC', to avoid confusion.



In all seriousness though, it would be pretty cool if they can detect exoplanets with O₂ in their atmospheres; That would be a very strong indication of extraterrestrial life.

 

[LordKiran]

Hmm. GMT might be a confusing acronym, as it's already used or Greenwich Mean Time.

They should change it to Ultralarge Telescope Chile, or 'UTC', to avoid confusion.



In all seriousness though, it would be pretty cool if they can detect exoplanets with O₂ in their atmospheres; That would be a very strong indication of extraterrestrial life.

As far as we know. Its still entirely possible we discover forms of life that blow our minds and destroy our conceptions of what is life. That'd be neat. I'm hoping for rock monsters.

 

[Bomb#20]

As far as we know. Its still entirely possible we discover forms of life that blow our minds and destroy our conceptions of what is life. That'd be neat. I'm hoping for rock monsters.

 

[bilby]

Hmm. GMT might be a confusing acronym, as it's already used or Greenwich Mean Time.

They should change it to Ultralarge Telescope Chile, or 'UTC', to avoid confusion.



In all seriousness though, it would be pretty cool if they can detect exoplanets with O₂ in their atmospheres; That would be a very strong indication of extraterrestrial life.

As far as we know. Its still entirely possible we discover forms of life that blow our minds and destroy our conceptions of what is life. That'd be neat. I'm hoping for rock monsters.

I'll let you in on a little secret: We already have, right here on Earth.

There's no universally agreed definition for 'life' that doesn't exclude some things that intuition tells us are alive, or encompass some things that intuition tells us are not alive. And the flaws in the most common definitions are not small, either.

It seems that life/non-life is a false dichotomy, and that reality has a continuum of states between one and the other extreme, for most useful definitions of 'life'. (Is a virus alive? Is a prion? It depends who you ask, and what features of life they care about at the time).

If that doesn't blow your mind, then you haven't understood it properly (or you are highly resistant to having your mind blown).

As for rock monsters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synanceia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyura_chilensis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithops