5月11日VOA聽力：科學家等待地上最大千裏鏡中探討宇宙未知
The mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope that gaveus the stunning pictures of deep space is only about4.5 square meters.
The primary mirror of the James Webb SpaceTelescope will be 25 square meters, so a strongemergence expect for even higher-quality results.
But both will be dwarfed by the Giant MagellanTelescope, under construction in Chile's Atacama Desert.
Its mirror array covers about 368 square meters.
By looking at different parts of the visible and infrared spectrums, the two new telescopes willcomplement each other, says Magellan Telescope director Patrick McCarthy.
“The two working together, I think, will give us a complete picture,whether we are looking atplanets around nearby stars, black holes in the centers of other galaxies, or back to that earlyuniverse that we call the First Light, when we see the first stars in the first galaxies. ”
To isolate it from vibrations, the 1,200-ton telescope will rest on an oil flotation bearingsystem, completely free of any friction.
A range of cameras and spectrographs will record and dissect the received light, looking forsignatures of atoms and molecules.
And the light coming from billions of kilometers away may be impossibly faint.
“The photons come in one every 15 to 20 minutes, so it takes a long time to collect that light.
In our case, we think we'll get a few photons a minute, but you need hundreds to get a goodsignal, so it just takes patience. ”
McCarthy says with a telescope sensitive enough to detect a birthday candle on the moon,nobody knows what to expect.
“The most important is the unexpected, the new discoveries, the unanticipatedbreakthroughs.
That's always been the story of astronomy.
When you build a new capability, young people find things that either no one expected, orthey prove that their elders were wrong. ”
The 1 billion joint project of the U.S., Australia, Brazil, South Korea and Chile is expected toopen for the first observations by 2022 and be fully operational by 2026.
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