This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Astronomers from the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere are involved in the design of a new telescope for the future - the Thirty Meter Telescope, or TMT. Its name says it all, the new telescope would have a mirror that is 30 meters (approximately 98 feet) in diameter! Such huge telescopes (there are at least three being considered now) are termed Extremely Large Telescopes, or ELTs. The size of a telescope is important for two reasons: a bigger collecting area means that more light can be gathered, allowing astronomers to study the faintest of objects within a reasonable amount of telescope time; and the increased mirror size also enables higher resolution so that the fine details of objects can be examined more closely. A telescope delivers the light it gathers to a focus where various instruments can be used to analyze the light. Dr. Christopher Packham of the University of Florida is working in collaboration with a Japanese colleague to design an instrument for the TMT that will form images and spectra of distant objects. This instrument will work in the mid-infrared (in the part of the electromagnetic spectrum with wavelengths longer than visible light but shorter than microwaves). Analysis of mid-infrared light can tell us how planets are formed from the material in disks around stars and also how the objects swirling around a black hole behave. The work is supported by the Division of Astronomical Sciences of the National Science Foundation through the Grants for Rapid Response Research (RAPID) program.
