Oz scientists will help look back through time

Scientists in Australia are claiming to reveal the secrets of the early universe through their technologies.

Scientists in Australia are claiming to reveal the secrets of the early universe through their technologies that are being developed in Canberra.

Australian National University’s Mount Stromlo Observatory is said to be home of the Advanced Instrument and Technology Centre,where researchers will design a number of parts for the Giant Magellan Telescope,’Sydney Morning Herald’ reported on Tuesday.

Australis’s Minister for Science,Kim Carr,launched the next stage of the centre’s expansion to allow the work on the Magellan telescope and other space science projects.

The USD 700 million telescope will be the largest optical telescope ever built.

It is being constructed by an international consortium,of which ANU is a member,and will sit high atop the Chilean Andes.

When completed in about 2018,it will provide images up to 10 times sharper than the Hubble telescope,allowing astronomers to gaze at objects more than 12.5 billion light years from Earth.

“It will tell us about the early universe,including the formation of the first stars and the evolution of galaxies only a few million years after the Big Bang,” Senator Carr said.

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He said that the federal government was contributing USD 88 million towards the construction of the new part of the centre,with the total contribution for the whole project about USD 220 million.

“We have some of the greatest astronomers in the world working in Australia,and we have got to make sure that we provide them with the very best equipment so that they can continue their work bringing new inventions to Australians and making sure that we maintain our standard of living in this country”,Carr added .

The Advanced Instrument and Technology Centre will help design parts for the Magellan telescope,including an instrument to pick up the most distant objects in the universe and adaptive optics technology that will remove the blur that arises from looking through our atmosphere.

The director of the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Mount Stromlo,Harvey Butcher,said the new centre and the technologies it will produce would help scientists look back in time to the earliest parts of the universe.

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“The biggest telescopes we have now allow us to see objects in which the light has taken five or six or seven billion years to come to us,really far away,so we can look back in time and see what these galaxies were like five,six or seven billion years ago,” Butcher said.