|
CHINA> National
![]() |
|
Related
China's finest telescope to trace universe's origin
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2009-06-05 11:20 Inspired by her mentor Su Dingqiang, a leading Chinese astronomer who is also a prestigious CAS member, the 58-year-old Cui combined a 15-story-high scope with a missile silo-like observatory tower on top of a 960-meter hill 170 kilometers northeast of Beijing. During observation nights, the upper parts of the lower dome are removed and starlight is reflected from the mirror up through the 40-meter tube to the primary mirror. The light of space is fed into the front ends of optical fibers positioned on a focal plane, before real-time data are recorded into spectrographs fixed in a room underneath. The idea was developed from the spherical and aspherical mirror combination, invented by German opticist B. V. Schmidt in 1931. It also uses advanced active optics technologies.
Dr. R. N. Wilson, inventor of the active optics theory, wrote in an e-mail to Cui, his former colleague at the European Southern Observatory, that LAMOST "embodies every aspect of the most advanced and modern telescope technology." Carrying on mankind's dream of understanding the universe, inspired by the invention of astronomical telescope by Italy's Galileo Galilei, Chinese scientists are hoping to capitalize on the "costly big toy" to unravel dark matter, dark energy, as well as celestial formation and evolution. Before LAMOST, the American Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) had been the most powerful spectra-collecting optical telescope. Installed in a New Mexican astronomical station, SDSS has an aperture of 2.5 meters.
"We're quite comfortable with the scans," Cui said. "Most of the time, we shot the targets exactly, if not hitting the bull's eyes." University of Chicago Prof. Donald York, founding director of SDSS, said in an e-mail interview with Xinhua that the data for well-positioned fibers of LAMOST looked "very good." York, however, said that precise calibrated data in wavelength and absolute flux of the celestial bodies cannot be done until the telescope's fiber positioning becomes "perfect" after debugging. California Institute of Technology astronomer Richard Ellis said, "A large telescope is one of the best examples of what a civilization does well, and I think here we look at the LAMOST now and we see what China has done." Cui said Chinese scientists might consider building a similar big telescope on Antarctica, to gain wider and clearer cosmic view. |
泾川县| 兴城市| 东乌珠穆沁旗| 上饶市| 普定县| 柯坪县| 岚皋县| 六枝特区| 江油市| 内黄县| 呼图壁县| 扶绥县| 平陆县| 广州市| 乐至县| 隆子县| 塘沽区| 奉化市| 西充县| 古丈县| 榕江县| 青铜峡市| 江城| 巧家县| 仁化县| 钟祥市| 古交市| 城固县| 台州市| 贵德县| 广东省| 车险| 麻江县| 汝南县| 安西县| 黎城县| 黑龙江省| 汶上县| 阿拉善盟| 孙吴县| 惠安县|