Standing tall over the Cheshire plain is the Lovell Telescope - the flagship of the Jodrell Bank Observatory. With a steerable dish over 76 meters in diameter, this radio telescope was the largest of its kind when it was first built in the 1950's. Since then it has played a pivotal role in radio astronomy. In the 1960's observations at Jodrell Bank confirmed the existence of rotating neutron stars called 'pulsars' and just last year discovered a galaxy made almost entirely of Dark Matter. In addition to these discove- ries, the telescope is an integral part of the MERLIN array of UK telescopes - which stretches across 218km in Britain - and the European VLBI Network, spread throughout Europe and beyond, which provides images of higher resolution than any optical telescope on the planet! Fly there with Google Earth (requires Google Earth to be installed on your machine)!
Image credit: I. Morison / JBO
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Since November 1999, the Cosmic Background Imager (CBI) has studied some of the earliest ages of our Universe from its vantage point high atop the Andes mountains in Chajnantor, Chile. Unlike an optical telescope with a big mirror, this telescope focusses on radio waves at roughly 1 cm, which means these signals have a frequency about 1000 times higher than your favourite FM radio station. The CBI 'listens' to echoes from a very early epoch, shortly after the Big Bang. These echoes give clues about the ingredients of the 'primordial soup' that lead to the Universe full of galaxies and other 'cosmic pancakes' we see today! The CBI uses a technique called 'interferometry', which combines incoming radio waves (thus making them 'interfere' with each other) to produce patterns which reveal a great deal of information about the signal. Fly there with Google Earth (requires Google Earth to be installed on your machine)!
Image: courtesy of CALTECH
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Aloha from the Gemini North Telescope! Located high - 4,200 meters above sea level! - atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii, this large tele- scope scans the heavens in amazing detail with a mirror that is 8 meters in diameter. This telescope is equipped with a large assortment of instruments to observe in both optical and near-infrared wavelengths. Astronomers at Oxford University, working with an international team called the SuperNovae Legacy Survey, use this tele- scope's 'Multi Object Spectrograph' to observe distant exploding stars called Type Ia Supernovae. These images from Gemini are proving to be a great help in understanding the mysterious dark energy ingredient that makes up our Universe. Gemini North (fly there with Google Earth!) has it's twin telescope in the southern hemisphere - Gemini South (fly there with Google Earth!). Together, they enable us to view objects anywere on the sky.
Image: Gwmini North (top, courtesy M. Jarvis) and Gemini South. Credit: Gemini Observatory / AURA
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As the name implies, the Square Kilometre Array will be a large instrument, comprised of many radio telescopes, that will cover an entire square kilometre. This vast size will make it 100 times more sensitive and 10 000 times faster than any other radio telescope in the world. With such a big size in mind, a large team of astronomers is working hard to design and build this radio telescope. This team is made up of astronomers from around the world, and at the moment they are trying to decide where to build the telescope. After choosing a site, the SKA will be built after 2010 and will begin making observations in 2015. With its great precision, the SKA will be able to see young glaxies that were formed when the universe was less than 1 billion years old (that's over 12 billion years ago!).
Image: Four proposed locations: (clockwise from top left) Mileura Station, Australia; Guiyan, Ghizou province, China; Pampa de la Bola, Argentina; Karoo, South Africa. Centre: proposed design. Credits: SKA team and Xilostudios
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Hola from Chile! Here in the mountains of the Atacama desert in northern Chile you can find an amazing observatory called the Very Large Telescope. As you can see from the photo, this 'telescope' is actually a collection of many telescopes - four of these telescopes have massive mirrors, 8.2 metres in diameter, and are complemented by four smaller moveable ones with mirrors that are 1.8 meters wide. These telescopes can observe outer space independently, or work together using a technique called 'interferometry' to look at fine detail from brighter objects. This telescope system is run by ESO, the European Organisation for Astronomy, and just last year it made some amazing images of other planets around stars that are over 173 light years away! Fly there with Google Earth (requires Google Earth to be installed on your machine)!
Image: courtesy of ESO
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At a maximum distance ("apogee") of 114,000 from the planet Earth orbits the XMM-Newton X-ray observatory. This satellite holds 3 X-ray telescopes that observe some of the most violent and fantastic events in our Universe. Thankfully, the Earth's atmosphere keeps these high-energy rays off the surface of our planet, which is why this observatory keeps its lonely watch from space. Some special steps have to be taken to observe these X-rays, as they would pass right through a normal mirror. XMM-Newton uses 58 special curved mirrors to deflect incoming X-rays and focus them onto one of the three on-board telescopes. With this unique technology, this telescope can see the most energetic parts of stars, explore great explosions from stellar collisions and peer into regions of very, very hot gas that emitted X-rays during periods of star formation billion of years ago.
Image: courtesy of ESA
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