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Chinese Scientists Complete a Concept Study for a 6-Meter Space Telescope to Find Habitable Exoplanets

With JWST safely in space, researchers are designing the next generation of space telescope that could Earth-sized worlds orbiting sunlike stars. Chinese scientists released a concept paper this week for the Tianlin mission, a 6-meter UV/Optical/IR space telescope, which could begin operations in 2045. This telescope would search for rocky planets in the habitable zones around nearby stars and search for biosignatures using direct imaging. The team estimates they could obtain the spectrum of 20 candidate exoplanets in the first five years of operation.

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Thin Flat Lenses Could Unleash a Revolution in Space Telescopes

Space telescopes use traditional polished mirrors like ground telescopes, which are heavy, unwieldy, and expensive to build. A new type of flexible telescope lens could be lighter and larger, creating space telescopes that could collect 100 times more light than JWST. Instead of a single large, delicate telescope, the Nautilus Space Observatory would consist of a fleet of lighter, cheaper, identical spacecraft working together to produce images. They’d use thin diffractive lenses, which have been improved to the point that they can produce near-perfect image quality.

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The Biggest Telescope in the World is Half Built

The European Southern Observatory continues to build the largest telescope in the world, the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). Construction of the telescope began in 2014 with flattening the top of a mountain named Cerro Armazones in Chile’s Atacama Desert. ESO just announced that progress on construction has crossed the 50% mark.  The remaining work should …

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Astronomers Map out the Radio Waves Coming From Large Satellite Constellations

You’ve heard that satellite constellations like Starlink are a problem for astronomers and their telescopes. Because the satellites are communicating with radio waves, they’re also an issue for radio astronomers. A new study used the Low-Frequency Array to observe 68 Starlink satellites as they flew overhead. The telescopes could detect the “unintended electromagnetic radiation” emanating from electronics onboard the Starlink satellites. These could impact radio observations, and unlike visible light, the glare isn’t coming from reflected light but emissions from the satellites themselves.

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It Might Take Space Telescopes to Finally Resolve the Crisis in Cosmology

Gravitational wave (GW) observatories have been a great addition to cosmologists’ arsenal in the lack decade. With their first effective detection at the Laser Interferometric Gravitational Observatory completed in 2015, they opened up a whole new world of data collection for scientists. However, so far, they haven’t solved one of the fundamental problems at the …

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ESO is Using a New System to Allocate Telescope Time. It’s Working Well

Most astronomers know the struggle of getting time on the world’s most powerful telescopes. Even though this observing time might literally be the most important thing to their career prospects, there are always more studies than there is time available to perform them. Typically, each telescope system has a panel of experts that determine which …

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