UT, A&M telescope to be 10 times sharper than Hubble

Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) Photo: GMTO Corporation Photo: GMTO Corporation Image 1 of / 9 Caption Close UT, A&M telescope to be 10 times sharper than Hubble 1 / 9 Back to Gallery

Even by Texas standards, this one is humongous.

Picture a giant telescope with seven mirrors, each weighing 20 tons. Yet the surface is smooth to within a twentieth of a wavelength of light. It's not a science fiction movie, but reality.

This Saturday, the third mirror for the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) will be cast inside a rotating furnace lab at the Steward Observatory in Tucson, Ariz. It's the only facility in the world where mirrors this large are being made.

The project is of huge interest to officials at Texas A&M University and the University of Texas at Austin, which are international partners in the endeavor.

The GMT mirrors are considered to be the greatest astronomical optics challenge ever undertaken, and will allow astronomers to answer some of the most pressing questions about the cosmos, according to a news article from Texas A&M University-College of Science.

The telescope will provide insights into "the detection, imaging, and characterization of planets orbiting other stars, the nature of dark matter and dark energy, the physics of black holes, and how stars and galaxies evolved during the earliest phases of the universe," Texas A&M reported.

Nicholas Suntzeff, Texas A&M professor of physics and astronomy and director of the Texas A&M Astronomy Program, shared his thoughts about the project in an email:

"The GMT will be so powerful such that we can see backward in time to when there were no stars or galaxies yet, only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. This really is the edge of the universe, and only these telescopes can reach this far," he wrote.

"The third mirror is a significant milestone," Suntzeff wrote in the email. "With it, the GMT will now have more light-collecting area than any telescope now operating. We could use these mirrors to build the largest telescope. But our goal is seven mirrors, and with the complete set of mirrors, we will be able to understand the origin of all the stars and galaxies, and if we are lucky, watch the process of life unfolding."

Peter Strittmatter, who heads of Department of Astronomy at the Steward Observatory, called the telescope "another major step forward in both sensitivity and image sharpness."

"In fact the GMT will be able to acquire images 10 times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope and will provide a powerful complement not only to NASA's 6.5-meter James Webb Space Telescope but also to the Atacama Large Millimeter Array and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, both located in the southern hemisphere," he stated in the news article.

Other international partners in the GMT Project are Astronomy Australia Ltd., the Australian National University, the Carnegie Institution for Science, Harvard University, the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Arizona, and the University of Chicago.

For more information about the GMT, visit www.gmto.org.