This is the third book in the series that included 'The Theory of Nothing' the "The Universe Revealed.' My purpose in this new book is to more fully explain how science is actually done and how science fits into our culture along with religion and p...
This is really exciting to me! It's the epitome of modern telescope design and it's being installed on a mountain in a very dry desert in Chile.
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The European Southern Observatory is on Cerro Paranal in the Alacama Desert of northern Chile. Why did they go to all the trouble of installing 4 - 8.2-meter diameter telescopes in such a desolate location?
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The reason is simple. The Alacama Desert is the driest desert on Earth, and the Cerro Paranal is a 2,635 meter (8,645 ft.) above sea level. This combination makes the best possible chance of detecting infrared radiation, which is easily diffused and absorbed by atmospheric water vapor.
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As you might know, modern astronomy is seeking ways to image distant objects in the full electromagnetic spectrum, and infrared opens up seeing all sorts of things that cannot be seen in visible light. Another new concept in astronomy is the combing of several telescopes to function as an interferometer. This idea combines telescopes to theoretically produce an aperture equal to the separation between the telescopes. This makes imaging very tiny objects possible. As it turns out, this VTL was able to obtain a direct image of an exoplanet and observe the afterglow of a very distant gamma ray burst.
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I emphasize that this VLT telescope is capable of obtaining astronomical data that rivals the Hubble Space telescope. By use of the interferometer mode, the light from the four telescope mirrors are combined by means of tunnels to a single beam combining lab.
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My take on this is that I could imagine a large number of space telescopes combining to create the ultimate image of exoplanets. I'm sure that it would cost a lot of money to do this, but it could allow astronomers to view exoplanets like they view Mars.
