An artist’s illustration of the Thirty-Meter Telescope atop the volcanic peak of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
CREDIT: Thirty Meter Telescope

Construction of a massive telescope triple the size of the world’s largest current optical telescopes is set to begin on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano this year.

The Thirty-Meter Telescope (TMT), which will consist of interlocking, segmented mirrors with a diameter totaling 30 meters (98 feet), has raised 83 percent of its funding, and builders could break ground by this summer, the project’s leaders say.

“We’re really ready to go with this telescope,” Dr. Michael Bolte, associate director for the TMT project, said last month at a meeting of the American Astronomical Association in Washington, D.C. [Thirty Meter Telescope: Hawaii’s Giant Space Eye (Gallery)]

If construction goes ahead on schedule, the telescope will have its “first light” in 2022.

The TMT is closely modeled on technology used by the twin 10-m Keck telescopes in Hawaii, currently some of the world’s most powerful optical telescopes.  The TMT will have nine times the light-collecting power of Keck, and 12 times sharper images than the Hubble Space Telescope using the tools of adaptive optics, Bolte said.

The new observatory will enable exciting new studies of the first epoch of star formation, the assembly and evolution of galaxies, the discovery and characterization of exoplanets, and other areas.

Like all ground-based telescopes, the TMT will be subject to atmospheric turbulence, which is the reason why stars appear to twinkle. But the TMT will have technology known as adaptive optics to “de-blur” the images it captures with its giant mirror.

Design is underway for a suite of sophisticated instruments. The Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (IRIS) and The Infrared Multi-object Spectrometer (IRMS) will be able to study the chemical composition, or spectra, of astronomical objects in near-infrared light, and will be capable of “diffraction limited” imaging, which has a resolution as good as the instrument’s theoretical limit. The Wide Field Optical Spectrometer (WFOS) will enable imaging and spectroscopy in visible and near-ultraviolet light.

via Construction of Giant Telescope in Hawaii Could Begin This Summer | Space.com.

NASA’s Kepler mission announced Wednesday the discovery of 715 new planets. These newly-verified worlds orbit 305 stars, revealing multiple-planet systems much like our own solar system.

Nearly 95 percent of these planets are smaller than Neptune, which is almost four times the size of Earth. This discovery marks a significant increase in the number of known small-sized planets more akin to Earth than previously identified exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system.

“The Kepler team continues to amaze and excite us with their planet hunting results,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “That these new planets and solar systems look somewhat like our own, portends a great future when we have the James Webb Space Telescope in space to characterize the new worlds.”

Since the discovery of the first planets outside our solar system roughly two decades ago, verification has been a laborious planet-by-planet process. Now, scientists have a statistical technique that can be applied to many planets at once when they are found in systems that harbor more than one planet around the same star.

To verify this bounty of planets, a research team co-led by Jack Lissauer, planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., analyzed stars with more than one potential planet, all of which were detected in the first two years of Kepler’s observations — May 2009 to March 2011.

via NASA’s Kepler Mission Announces a Planet Bonanza, 715 New Worlds | NASA.