The Future of Telescopes

The plan of the future is to design a 100 meter telescope that would be able to acquire 1736 times more light than the Hubble Telescope is capturing today. This obviously would allow for pictures in greater detail, and the ability to observe phenomenon further back in space time. Paul Hickson, a Canadian astronomer proposed a liquid mirror telescope. Though a manned mission to the moon will be required to achieve anything close to the telescope desired, it is simply a question of whether funding is available for such projects.

As astronomers look back in time, they need more powerful, higher resolution instruments

as well as the search for extrasolar planets. One of the key areas the new technology has to look at is the epoch of reionisation, some one billion years after the Big Bang. 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe cooled enough to become opaque so that very little light was being emitted for us to observe.Later the universe began to change and objects like stars and galaxies formed. The heat from these objects began ionising the neutral gas of the universe, creating more galaxies and stars in bubbles of hotter regions that eventually spread to form the reionised universe we see today.

Some of the new designs of telescopes are incredible. The picture to the left is the E-ELT, one of the new designs of Extremely Large Telescope(any telescope over 20m in diameter). The small white shape to the bottom left of the picture is a car. The next decade will truly revolutionize the way astronomers see the sky!