China has constructed the most powerful optical telescope in the world, with which they are set to reveal the mysteries of the universe, local media said.
The telescope, whose construction costed $ 34,4 million (26,82 million euros), is located on the top of a mountain 960m high, within an investigation base of the National Astronomic Observatories, under the monitoring of the Science Academy of China, situated 170 km north of Beijing.
The ‘LAMOST’, as the telescope was named, has an effective aperture of more than 4 meters, which makes it the largest one of it’s characteristics, and 4.000 optical fibers that allow the decoding the light of the stars and convert it into a huge amount of spectrography data.
This way, the vision of the “LAMOST” can reach twice the distance than the “SDSS”, installed in New Mexico (USA), and considered until now as the largest optical telescope in the world.
The director and founder of the “SDSS” and professor of the University of Chicago, Donald York, confirmed that the “LAMOST” can be more useful than the “SDSS” if the Chinese astronomers get it to work in a high regime.
“The ‘LAMOST’ has 4.000 fibers for each ’shot’, 5,5 times more than ‘SDSS”, York stated.
Meanwhile, the professor of the Technology Institute of California, Richard Ellis, the astronomer invited by the Science Academy of China to give his advices about the “LAMOST”, said that it’s still soon to know exactly “how much can it reach”, yet he added that in his opinion, “it should improve the results of the SDSS both in speed as in depth”.
“We still have to get an idea about the structure of our galaxy”, said Chu Yaoquan, a member of the team of engineers involved in the project.
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Posted by E.J. on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 at 19:04:26
Posted in Americas, Archive, Asia, Sci & Tech, World
