TUCSON — Hot and dry air, perfused with a scent reminiscent of a warmed hair straightener, stuffed a hangar-sized room beneath the football stadium at the University of Arizona. The space, part of the Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab, was dominated by a gyrating, carousel-sized furnace, fire truck red and shaped like a flying saucer. The swirling cocoon of a colossal light collector.
In the heart of that inferno, nearly 17,500 kilograms of borosilicate glass — roughly four semitruck loads — had melted into a crystal clear fluid. If all goes to plan, the molten material will anneal to form the body of an enormous mirror — one as tall as a two-story house, if stood on edge. The mirror is the last of seven needed to capture light for what will be the world’s most powerful optical instrument, the Giant Magellan Telescope.
Slated to start operating in the late 2020s, the telescope, developed by an international consortium of research institutions, will repose on a mountaintop in Chile’s Atacama Desert, beneath some of the clearest night skies on Earth. There, within a yet-to-be-built, 22-story enclosure, the seven primary mirrors will be united in a flowerlike formation, Januzzi explains. “We’ve got six petals, and one in the middle.”
Together, the mirrors will function as a single unit, about as wide as an adult blue whale is long, that reflects light into the telescope’s secondary mirrors and, ultimately, its scientific instruments. This shiny expanse will provide the new telescope with an image resolution at least four times that of today’s most advanced space telescopes.
2023-10-30 06:00:00
Article from www.sciencenews.org