Images produced by MAVIS will be three times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope that was launched into Earth’s low orbit in 1990 and remains in operation.Īssociate Professor Richard McDermid, a scientist based at Sydney’s Macquarie University, says the new telescope will change the way we explore space. Scientists in Australia say the new technology will allow them to “peer back into the early Universe” and help them explore how the first stars formed 13 billion years ago, as well as monitoring changes in the weather on planets and moons in our solar system.
It aims to remove blurring from conventional telescope images caused by turbulence in Earth’s atmosphere, which is why the stars appear to twinkle in the night sky.
It’s a long name for a highly complex instrument that will be the first of its kind.
The telescope is called MAVIS, or Multi-conjugate-adaptive-optics Assisted Visible Imager and Spectrograph. It promises to see further and clearer than the Hubble Space Telescope and unlock mysteries of the early Universe. This website uses a simple slider to demonstrate how our view of the universe has changed as the technology has improved.Australian scientists are leading an international consortium that is building one of the world’s most powerful ground-based telescopes.
#Nasa picture of the day australia upgrade#
On Wednesday, NASA published more stunning images from the JWST including a group of galaxies known as ‘Stephan’s Quintet’, a stellar nursery in the Carina Nebula, and the dramatic cloud of debris from a dying star in the Southern Ring Nebula.Įach of the phenomena has previously been captured by the Hubble Telescope – which has been in operation since 1990 – but a comparison with the pictures from JWST show just how much of an upgrade the new hardware is. “We haven’t yet seen how stars form in pristine gas, which is without any heavy elements – as such a state hasn’t existed for more than 13 billion years.” “All current star formation we can observe, such as in the Milky Way, is from enriched interstellar gas. “The first billion years of cosmic history have barely been explored,” he said. Karl Glazebrook, a Distinguished Professor at Swinburne University’s Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, said the telescope’s main purpose is to look back in time and “witness the birth of the first stars and galaxies in the early Universe”. Light from the galaxy cluster travelled billion years before arriving at the JWST’s finely tuned sensors and provides a look at the universe in its early stages. Image: NASAĮven with all these massive intergalactic objects, the image only shows a “a tiny sliver of the vast universe”, as per NASA’s description, since it is “approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length”. JWST’s first deep field of the SMACS 0723 galaxy cluster.
#Nasa picture of the day australia full#
The deep field image shows a startling array of different coloured galaxies, each filled with thousands of stars that create beautiful complex structures, the detail of which is on full display.īecause of how much mass the galaxy cluster contains, the first JWST image includes a serious of gravitational lensing – the visible effects of light bending where high mass objects create curves in spacetime. “Put together it’s a new window into the history of our universe.” “On the way, unfolding itself deploying a mirror 21 feet wide, a sunshield the size of a tennis court, and 250k tiny shutters each one smaller than a grain of sand. “Six and a half months ago, a rocket launched from Earth carrying the world’s newest, most powerful deep space telescope on a journey one million miles into the cosmos – that blows my mind, one million miles! On Tuesday, US President Joe Biden had the honour of unveiling the first picture: a deep field image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723. NASA this week released the first set of spectacular images taken by its James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), providing the highest ever resolution view of our early universe.
0 kommentar(er)
