Garnevich wants to learn how energy from the dying star decays over time. The screen shows a large mass with a plume coming from it. "The star just happened to die and its jet was pointed at us and we can see it most of the way across the universe," says Garnevich. Garnevich is interested in a supernova that exploded a few nights earlier. Notre Dame professor Peter Garnevich helps focus the LBT on another object, which is no small task given the instrument's complexity. But take the same picture six nights in a row and - if you know what you're looking for - you can see the ice balls moving.Īnd with the data this telescope gathers, Pogge says you can see a lot more, including how far are away an object is, what it is made of, what its mass is and how fast it's moving away from us. The cameras take an exposure – which lasts five minutes - and then the image is revealed on a computer screen. The LBT can see ice balls in the same region that are one or two miles wide. How small? Well, Pluto is roughly 1,200 miles wide. One of the first for tonight: the Kuiper Belt, which lies on the edge of the solar system, about 2.7 billion miles from Earth. There's a universe to look at, but time is limited, so scientists submit proposals for observation. He and a half-dozen others sit in a room filled with computer screens. In the control room, Richard Pogge, professor of astronomy at Ohio State University, types in coordinates for this night's viewing. The LBT cannot see farther than Hubble, but the images it sends back are much sharper and of a much wider field than the space telescope. The 580-ton telescope is twice as big as the next-largest telescope on Earth, and it has 10 times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope. LBT, as it's known for short, can probe deeper into the cosmos than any other instrument. The Large Binocular Telescope sits in a 17-story building atop an Arizona mountain. The best pair of eyes on Earth are now wide open. It lies 102 million light years from our Milky Way and has a flat disk of stars and glowing gas. One of the first images taken by the telescope is of the spiral galaxy NGC 2770.
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