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by Beth Haysom
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Colin Bradley, left, and Rodolphe Conan working on the test bench. |
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A minuscule, flexible mirror not much bigger than an eye pupil being tested by University of Victoria engineers will one day help astronomers peer at distant galaxies and watch stars being born.
UVic is part of a flagship North American endeavour to build a 30-metre telescope (TMT), the largest ever built. A team of UVic engineers is designing experimental equipment that will eventually be used in the new telescope. Phase one of the UVic development project will be completed this month.
The gigantic scope—with a light-collecting area nine times the size of the largest existing telescope and 100 times more powerful than the Hubble telescope—will operate like a giant eyeball, allowing astronomers to probe 10 billion light years deep into space.
The $750-million project is being undertaken by a private-public consortium, including universities in Canada and the United States, and is expected to be operational in 10 to 15 years.
Observations from the telescope will help answer questions about how stars, planets and galaxies form, and about dark matter and energy and the frequency and types of extra-solar planets.
UVic has built a "test bench" of experimental instrumentation needed to develop telescope parts such as a tiny "adaptive optics" mirror that will compensate for optical aberrations of the incoming light caused by Earth's atmosphere.
The project is assisted by $4 million from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (for the entire Canadian portion of the telescope project) and $2 million from the BC Knowledge Development Fund.
"The first stage of the experimentation project has gone really well," says Colin Bradley, a mechanical engineer who heads the team of engineers, physicists, graduate and undergraduate students involved in UVic's project. "We're helping to create a powerful and sophisticated tool that will lead to a tremendous amount of valuable scientific research."
In phase two of the project, UVic will be involved in the development of cutting-edge, adaptive optics technology needed to operate the scope and the 738 hexagonal mirror segments that span its 30-metre bowl. These work together like pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle to collect the light beaming to Earth from the far recesses of the universe.
UVic is working closely with scientists at the National Research Council's Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics observatory in Saanich. Various sites in the higher elevations of Hawaii, Mexico and Chile are under review as potential locations to build the telescope.
Use of the new telescope will be a huge benefit to UVic astronomers and theorists who are already engaged in high-level cosmology and galactic research.
"Since light travels at a finite speed, then when we look into distant space we're also looking back in time," says Dr. Kim Venn, a UVic astronomer and the Canada Research Chair in Observational Astrophysics.
"The TMT will make it possible to identify and study extremely faint sources in the very distant universe, when galaxies began to form.
"Many of the stars in galaxies formed shortly after the Big Bang when the universe began," she continues. "By studying those stars we can treat them like fossils and probe galaxy evolution from the earliest stages to recent times with unprecedented accuracy. This will help us to understand our place in the universe."
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