{"id":140560,"date":"2022-06-14T00:02:58","date_gmt":"2022-06-14T05:02:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/06\/liquid-mirror-telescope-opens-in-india"},"modified":"2022-06-14T00:02:58","modified_gmt":"2022-06-14T05:02:58","slug":"liquid-mirror-telescope-opens-in-india","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/06\/liquid-mirror-telescope-opens-in-india","title":{"rendered":"Liquid mirror telescope opens in India"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/liquid-mirror-telescope-opens-in-india3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A unique telescope that focuses light with a slowly spinning bowl of liquid mercury instead of a solid mirror has opened its eye to the skies above India. Such telescopes have been built before, but the 4-meter-wide International Liquid Mirror Telescope (ILMT) is the first large one to be purpose-built for astronomy, at the kind of high-altitude site observers prize\u2014the 2450-meter Devasthal Observatory in the Himalayas.<\/p>\n<p>Although astronomers must satisfy themselves with only looking straight up, the $2 million instrument, built by a consortium from Belgium, Canada, and India, is much cheaper than telescopes with glass mirrors. A stone\u2019s throw from ILMT is the 3.6-meter, steerable Devasthal Optical Telescope (DOT)\u2014built by the same Belgian company at the same time\u2014but for $18 million. \u201cSimple things are often the best,\u201d says Project Director Jean Surdej of the University of Li\u00e8ge. Some astronomers say liquid mirrors are the perfect technology for a giant telescope on the Moon that could see back to the time of the universe\u2019s very first stars.<\/p>\n<p>When a bowl of reflective liquid mercury is rotated, the combination of gravity and centrifugal force pushes the liquid into a perfect parabolic shape, exactly like a conventional telescope mirror\u2014but without the expense of casting a glass mirror blank, grinding its surface into a parabola, and coating it with reflective aluminum.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A unique telescope that focuses light with a slowly spinning bowl of liquid mercury instead of a solid mirror has opened its eye to the skies above India. Such telescopes have been built before, but the 4-meter-wide International Liquid Mirror Telescope (ILMT) is the first large one to be purpose-built for astronomy, at the kind [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":600,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-140560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/600"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140560"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140560\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}