Astronomy world will see a new improvement in telescope. The Cornell Caltech Atacama Telescope (CCAT) will be the largest telescope ever created that will observe at submillimetre wavelengths, which make up part of the microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. The cost of this telescope is about $100 million and estimated will complete in 2013, whooaaa!!!
It is to be built in the high Andes of northern Chile and expected to find hundreds of thousands of developing galaxies in the early universe, shedding light on the formation of big galaxies in the modern universe. This is a project by The California Institute of Technology, Cornell, and JPL. And it will benefits for submillimetre astronomy.
Submillimetre light is absorbed by water vapour in the atmosphere, so a clear view requires a location with as little water vapour above the telescope as possible. The sky above CCAT's planned perch atop a mountain in Chile's Atacama desert is twice as dry as that above the next best site atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
The submillimetre part of the spectrum is "a new frontier that's relatively unexplored", says CCAT team member Gordon Stacey of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, US.
Because light takes time to travel, telescopes can peer back in time by looking at distant objects. CCAT will uncover up to a million galaxies seen as they were about 10 billion to 12 billion years ago.
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World's largest Optical Telescope to see first light
Source :
- NewScientistSpace
- Submm
Categories:
Astronomy
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