India’s Liquid Mirror Telescope ready to observe the night sky

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High in the Himalayas, a new telescope has been installed to observe the night sky. The lens has a 4 meter (13 ft) lens, but that’s the key factor: It’s made of liquid mercury, a material rarely used in astrophotography.

It is called the International Liquid Mirror Telescope (abbreviated ILMT), the main component of this instrument is a layer of liquid mercury It floats on a very thin layer of compressed air. Mercury Rotating, taking on a parabolic shape in the process – useful for focusing light from the night sky. By positioning the camera at the focal point of the paraboloid, astronomers will then be able to photograph objects in the sky.

At first glance, the telescope mirror looks like an ordinary reflecting surface. but in fact, It’s made of liquid It is carefully sent up the mountain by a company that specializes in hazardous materials. As long as no one tries to drink However, telescope mirrors are perfectly safe—and, according to the ILMT team, an affordable alternative to other telescope mirror materials.

“The main advantage is the relatively low cost of large liquid mirrors compared to conventional large telescope mirrors,” Paul Hickson, a University of British Columbia astronomer working on liquid mirror technology, said in an email to Gizmodo. “For example, the cost of an ILMT is about a tenth of the cost of a meter of 3.6 [11.8-foot] Teleskop Optik Divastal – Conventional telescopes are about the same size and located in the same place.”

This place is very high. The telescope is located 8000 feet above sea level on the Indian side of the Himalayas. Hickson said he would examine a strip of sky directly in the sky containing hundreds of thousands of galaxies and several thousand quasars. (Quasars are very active galactic nuclei, and they are bright in the night sky.)

By photographing the night sky — just above the sky, where there is very little noise in the atmosphere — astronomers can infer what is changing in the sky over time, whether it’s a new supernova, an asteroid passing in front of a glowing object, or even black. . hole. It light from behind them.

“We estimate that 50 new examples of multiple imaged quasars should be detected in the ILMT field of view,” Jean Sordy, astrophysicist at the University of Liege in Belgium and project manager, said in an email to Gizmodo.

telescope saw that First light in AprilDan But scientific observations won’t start until the end of this year. When working at full capacity, The telescope will collect 10 gigabytes of data every night. Given the agile nature of the supernova and the gravitational lensing, ILMT was right to capture the event using pink silver.

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