8/14/2023 0 Comments Crash fever hubble![]() The Orion Nebula, located just below Orion’s Belt visible as smudge of light even with regular binoculars.Ĭonsidered young at about 1 million years old, this star, called Theta 1 Ori C, has been previously known to be in fact a binary star pair made up of two stars called C1 and C2. As the system was being tested and received what astronomers call “first light,” the team pointed it to a famous and well-studied massive star that gives the Great Orion Nebula (Object M42) most of its UV light. The new adaptive optics system, called MagAO for “Magellan Adaptive Optics,” has already made some important scientific discoveries, published today in three scientific papers in the Astrophysical Journal. ![]() “It’s almost like having a telescope with a 21-foot mirror in space.” “As a result, we can see the visible sky more clearly than ever before,” Close said. This so-called Adaptive Secondary Mirror (ASM) can change its shape at 585 points on its surface 1,000 times each second, counteracting the blurring effects of the atmosphere. To overcome atmospheric turbulence, which plagues earth-based telescopes by causing the image to blur, Close’s team developed a very powerful adaptive optics system that floats a thin (1/16th of an inch) curved glass mirror (2.8 feet across) on a magnetic field 30 feet above the telescope’s primary mirror. Until now, Hubble always produced the best visible light images, since even large ground-based telescope with complex adaptive optics imaging cameras could only make blurry images in visible light. These images are also at least twice as sharp as what the Hubble Space Telescope can make, because with its 21-foot diameter mirror, the Magellan telescope is much larger than Hubble with its 8-foot mirror. Credit: Laird Close and Ya-Lin Wu NASA, C.R. The bottom insert shows a different binary young star pair shaped by the stellar wind from Theta 1 Ori C. The middle inset photo reveals the binary nature of the Theta Ori C star pair. ![]() The background image, taken with the Hubble Space Telescope, shows the Trapezium cluster of young stars (pink) still in the process of forming. “Until now, large telescopes could make the theoretically sharpest photos only in infrared – or long wavelength – light, but our new camera can take photos that are twice as sharp in the visible light spectrum.” Equipped with the newly developed MagAO adaptive optics system, the Magellan Telescope revealed details about the Orion nebula. “As we move towards shorter wavelengths, image sharpness improves,” said Jared Males, a NASA Sagan Fellow at the UA’s department of astronomy. The twofold improvement over past efforts rests on the fact that for the first time, a telescope with a large diameter primary mirror is being used for digital photography at its theoretical resolution limit in visible wavelengths – light that the human eye can see. At that resolution, you could see a baseball diamond on the moon.” ![]() “We can, for the first time, make long-exposure images that resolve objects just 0.02 arcseconds across – the equivalent of a dime viewed from more than a hundred miles away. “It was very exciting to see this new camera make the night sky look sharper than has ever before been possible,” said UA astronomy professor Laird Close, the project’s principal scientist. ![]() The team has been developing this technology for more than 20 years at observatories in Arizona, most recently at the Large Binocular Telescope, or LBT, and has now deployed the latest version of these cameras in the high desert of Chile at the Magellan 6.5-meter telescope. Using a new camera and a telescope mirror that vibrates a thousand times each second to counteract atmospheric flickering, astronomers have achieved image resolution capabilities that could see a baseball diamond on the moonĪstronomers at the University of Arizona, the Arcetri Observatory near Florence, Italy and the Carnegie Observatory have developed a new type of camera that allows scientists to take sharper images of the night sky than ever before. Credit: Yuri Beletsky, Las Campanas Observatory UA astronomers take sharpest photos ever of the night sky The Magellan Telescope with MagAO’s Adaptive Secondary Mirror (ASM) is mounted at the top looking down some 30 feet onto the 21-foot diameter primary mirror, which is encased inside the blue mirror cell. ![]()
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