Dec. 20, 2007 -- While holiday shoppers were hustling around the malls last week, astronomers were stunned to learn of a gift that will go a long way to turning one of their most fervent dreams into reality.
A charitable foundation funded by Intel co-founder Gordan Moore and his wife Betty will donate $200 million to construct what is being billed as the largest optical telescope in the world.
"It's the biggest news to hit astronomy since the Hubble Space Telescope was launched," University of California-Santa Cruz astronomer Sandra Faber told Discovery News.
The Thirty Meter Telescope, or TMT, is a $1-billion project headed by the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and two university consortiums. With contributions from the California universities totaling $100 million, plus previous gifts from the Moore Foundation and other organizations, about one-third of the cash needed to build the observatory is in hand.
"Once you have that amount of funding then other people who might be in a position to fund it tend to think 'OK, now it's real. I'm in,'" Sky & Telescope executive editor Kelly Beatty said in an interview.
Construction of the TMT is scheduled to begin in 2009, with science observations on tap for 2016. A site has not yet been selected, but project managers have narrowed the options to locations in Chile, Hawaii or Mexico.
The Moore Foundation grant puts TMT well ahead of two rival next-generation telescopes, the Giant Magellan Telescope, a 24.5-meter observatory planned by the Carnegie Institution and partners, and the European Southern Observatory's 42-meter Extremely Large Telescope.
The National Science Foundation has called for construction of a 30-meter-class telescope to study the earliest galaxies of the universe as well as mysterious dark energy that is believed to be responsible for the accelerated spread of space itself.
With eight times the light-collecting power of current observatories and better resolution than the Hubble, a 30-meter telescope also might be able to image planets circling stars beyond our solar system.
"It's going to bring the universe 10 times closer," Faber said.
The twin, 10-meter Keck telescopes in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, are about to be displaced as the largest observatories in the world by the 10.4-meter Gran Telescopio Canarias at La Palma in Spain's Canary Islands.
The TMT's primary mirror will consist 492 individual 1.45-meter segments that will be constantly adjusted to maintain precise alignment. Advanced adaptive optics are planned to null the effects of wind and atmospheric disturbances.
Related Links:
our sites
video
mobile
shop
stay connected
corporate
