Telescopes

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“what I want to do is not to be a part of the studio, the master of the club is called "the internet"”

so master is really great, you can say that you can cook the chicken yes, you are a master, right? but you don't understand it egal, it's just a famous cook, make the whole thing like this and when you then work, you will have a meal that's right? safe, like this, you are going to have a drink now, let's try it out!

hmmm, so this is it? and so creamy hey, we can take a picture of it Nutella, where is your mother and dad? Nutella is Nutella

“tonight, we're going to explore an invention that's allowed human beings to peer into the heavens”

revealing parts of the universe that were invisible to the naked eye this invention is the telescope

will trace its development from the earliest handheld instruments through the incredible James Webb Space Telescope

which now orbits the Sun, a million miles from Earth there, it gazes into the far reaches of space and time, recording far away galaxies and long ago light we'll also examine some of the discoveries that telescopes have made possible and the celestial secrets they've uncovered so just relax and let your mind drift as we explore this sleepy history of telescopes can you picture the darkened sky at night time?

“the vast blackness scattered with sparkling stars”

the filmy strip of the Milky Way sprawling across it our ancestors stared up at that sight long ago and wondered about those twinkling points of light the view has changed very little since early humans saw it eons ago

and it still has the same power to spark wonder in our hearts today as it has since the dawn of time gazing at the vastness of the starscape can still evoke a feeling of curiosity, amazement, and awe

from the earliest moments of human history it prompted our forebearers to wonder about the story of the stars they could only watch, wait, and wonder at what they could see with their own eyes in the night sky today though we can see images deep in space

that our ancestors could never have imagined

yet these images still have the power to induce a great sense of wonder at the mystery and majesty of the cosmos take this image, captured not long ago with technology so futuristic that it can sound more like science fiction than actual fact though I assure you that it is fact indeed

it shows a dramatic spiral glowing blueish white against a background of star-spangled black delicate strands and glowing clouds form the spiral's arms swirling outward from a center of robins egg blue

it's technical name is M74 but it's also known as the Phantom Galaxy

“it's located within the cluster of stars that we humans”

viewing from Earth, call the Pisces constellation the Phantom Galaxy belongs to a category of spiral galaxies that astronomers have named Grand Design Spirals by this they mean that its shape is sharp and distinct as compared to other spiral galaxies whose outlines are bigger

and more amorphous and the Grand Design Spirals name fits the spiral is very grand indeed whispers of gas and dust form a lattice pattern that looks as fragile as a spider's web

“in the very center of the spiral there's no gas”

revealing a clear view of a knot of stars around which the galaxy swirls the image is splendid and breathtaking in its beauty it was captured by the James Webb Space Telescope this huge telescope was launched in this space on Christmas Day in 2021

where it settled into orbit almost a million miles from home

quickly it began transmitting striking images revealing previously unseen features of the universe in awe-inducing brilliance the web telescope has produced the clearest images of distant galaxies and far off details of the heavens ever seen by human eyes

and it's also recorded the clearest images of the past that's because on the scale of the universe space

can always equal time it takes time for the light from distant stars

to reach us here on earth the farther away the star the longer its light takes to reach us if we look at our sun we're actually seeing it as it was about eight minutes ago

“that's how long it takes for the sun's light to reach us”

the next nearest stars are much farther away than our sun and their light takes some four years to reach us so when we look upon those stars we're seeing them as they were four years ago and so it is that when we gaze into the starry night we're actually looking into the past by four years or more

mostly much more for example let us turn our minds eyes towards the Orion constellation the star pattern is most notable for a band of three distinct stars that form a line to the ancient Greeks this line marked the belt of a mythological hunter named Orion within this constellation we encounter the Orion Nebula

whose light takes fifteen hundred years to reach us this means that when we look at it now we are actually seeing how this Nebula looked around the year five hundred

it is thirty two million light years away

in other words that web telescope image

“shows the galaxy as it was thirty two million years ago”

long before humans walked the earth or gazed at the heavens or conceived of creating instruments to examine the stars scientists are using the web telescopes phantom galaxy images as part of an effort to discover more about how stars formed during the earlier days of the universe

the telescopes clearer observations will help them get a read on just how old the stars in these galaxies are they can combine the web data with material gathered by other earthbound telescopes

“together this information will allow us to learn more about the formation of the universe”

than ever possible before

but the first inventors of the telescope weren't thinking about looking back in time

and they had no conception of how vast and ancient our universe truly seems to be instead early telescope makers wanted to examine the visible sky in greater detail they wanted to look closer at the objects they could already see at night including our own moon and closest planetary neighbors these remained great mysteries at that time

meanwhile the farther out planets of our solar system hadn't even been discovered yet

“because they weren't visible to the naked eye”

humans had observed the night sky since before history began watching the stars and weaving intricate tales about them these stories included myths that live on today in the names of constellations like Pisces and Orion some ancient people made more methodical observations of the stars too

they kept complex records and even formed accurate predictions about celestial movements then several hundred years ago the advent of the telescope brought the cosmos into focus in a whole new way launching modern astronomy on a sky high trajectory quite literally here's how it began

around the start of the 1600s craftsmen in the Netherlands were making advances in creating eyeglasses to allow people to see better they drew on knowledge about the science of optics that had been developing throughout the Middle Ages

various scholars and innovators had made advances in the area over the prior centuries these included the Islamic scientists al-Kindi in the 9th century and Ibn Saal and Ibn Al-Heitham in the 10th as well as the English Christian fryer and scientist Roger Bacon in the 13th century inventors in Europe began to use lenses to magnify objects

and to make them appear closer than they were in 1608 several different spectacle makers in the Netherlands

created what were essentially the first telescopes

however these were intended for earth bound use

not for observation of the cosmos

“they were referred to as perspective glasses”

and they magnified objects three times making them look three times larger or closer than they looked normally the fact that several different spectacle makers created these prospective glasses at the same time highlights the reality that they were drawing on a significant amount of existing knowledge in the field

at the time however it led to battles over who would get credit for the innovation and wealth from it

“whose spectacle makers in one town Hans Lipper Hay and Zacharias Johnson both developed prototypes”

leading to some claims that the former stole the idea from the latter Lipper Hay filed a patent for this instrument for as he described it seeing things far away as if they were near a few weeks later another lens maker from another part of the Netherlands named Yakup Matius applied for a very similar patent

the government of the Netherlands turned down both patent applications

“but paid Lipper Hay a good deal of money to create binoculars using the technology”

the developers of these early telescopes saw them as useful for observations on earth such as for surveying land and conducting military surveillance certain pioneering astronomers however saw the value of these Dutch perspective glasses for revealing the heavens

among them was the revolutionary scientist Galileo Galilei living in what is now the country of Italy

Galileo heard reports about the new perspective glasses the year after the rival patents were filed in the Netherlands he immediately came up with his own slightly different version Galileo found a way to modify his design so that his telescope magnified objects to eight times their size, rather than just three this was a necessary improvement if they were to be used to observe objects very far away

like in space by the end of that year he created an instrument that could make objects look 20 times larger than when they were viewed with the naked eye eventually he would succeed in creating a telescope that could magnify 30 times Galileo was reportedly the first to point his telescope upwards to gaze into the mysteries of the night sky and publish his observations of space

the powerful new instrument allowed Galileo to publish new discoveries

like Jupiter's four largest moons and sun spots on the surface of our sun Galileo demonstrated his telescope in Venice to great success and was rewarded with a lifetime position as a lecturer Galileo's largest telescope had a lens just two inches wide and even his instruments which were so much more powerful than those made in the Netherlands were weak compared to today's incredible technology but with these rudimentary tools he made ground-breaking observations through his simple telescopes

and with him he was able to discern that this previously mysterious Milky band was actually made up of many individual stars

“it wasn't some kind of fog or celestial milk it's our galaxy Galileo also turned his scopes on the moon”

where he saw mountains and valleys the no sign of the fabled man in the moon his documentation of the lunar landscape countered the common belief of the time

that the moon was a perfectly smooth ball

Galileo was able to observe the planet Jupiter and discover its four largest moons as well

“which are invisible to humanize without help a rival astronomer Simon Marius of Germany”

also spotted these moons around the same time and he gave them the names by which they're known today

he named them E.O. Europa, Gannamide and Calisto after characters from Greek and Roman mythology who were associated with Jupiter, the King of the Gods

following the trail blazing inventions and observations of Galileo the Dutch spectacle makers and their contemporaries many other scientists continued developing new and better telescopes

“they came up with and for more powerful ways to magnify celestial objects”

and soon they were able to start observing phenomena in the outer reaches of our solar system and beyond they created larger and stronger telescopes with ease they could witness more and more details in space that had formerly been invisible and unsuspected they uncovered hitherto unknown planets circling our sun far away from the earth for example at the end of the 1700s astronomers found the distant planet Uranus

they observed this newly discovered planet and carefully recorded its motion in doing so the scientists noticed that its orbit around the sun was irregular in ways they couldn't fully explain as they examined its odd orbit however they realized that it could be explained if there was an even more distant planet as yet undiscovered whose gravity was pulling on Uranus and so some of the scientists said to work calculating where such an invisible planet might lie

in order to have the gravitational effect they observed on Uranus's orbit their calculations proved impressively accurate and sure enough in 1846 an astronomer in Berlin observed a grand new planet in just about the spot they decalculated the newly discovered planet was named Neptune after the ancient Roman god of the sea Neptune was too far away to be seen from earth without a telescope it circled the sun in the lonely outskirts of the solar system

we now now that it's an ice-trient a large planet made up of heavy elements surrounded by icy methane clouds

the suniest time on Neptune its high noon is only about as bright as the dimest twilight on earth

“it takes the remote planet 164 years to orbit the sun”

so a single twilight Neptune year fills the span of more than a century and a half year on earth all this has been revealed by the observations made possible by telescopes and the same year Neptune was discovered another astronomer used a homemade telescope to spot the planet's largest moon it would be more than 100 years though before Neptune's other moons were seen by human eyes

over a century after Neptune's discovery during the 1900s astronomers used ever improving telescopes

to spot a second moon and a third one orbiting the ice giant

“in 1989 an unmanned spacecraft called Voyager 2 approached the planet and photographed it”

beaming the images back to earth the Voyager mission went to the far ends of the solar system observing distant planets and sending the pictures back to human observers here at home scientists knew very little about Neptune before Voyager's observations because it is so very far away

but with detailed photos the spaceship sent back they learned a great deal about the planet including that it was circled by many moons

“then even more moons were discovered after the Voyager mission”

and in 2009 the Hubble Space Telescope took photos of the 14th moon orbiting Neptune

now close to two centuries after humans first laid eyes on the planet

the web telescope has captured its own image of Neptune and it's a picture that would surely have astounded and inspired those 19th century discovers in the web telescope image Neptune is a white globe that shines with otherworldly brilliance

it appears translucent like a delicate ice sculpture or a fragile ball of frosted glass two filmy bands trace an elliptical route around the luminous planet these are Neptune's rings the image is ethereal and hauntingly lovely

astronomers say it's also the clearest view humans have ever had of Neptune's rings since the Voyager to spacecraft photographed them more than three decades ago in the image the planet closed with the cool shining white of an ice cave ordinarily Neptune appears slightly blue and color

and effect of methane gas in its atmosphere but the web telescope detects light outside the visible spectrum in for red light that humans can't see with the naked eye and at those wavelengths the planet and its moon don't look blue

causing the planet to appear a nearly transparent white in the web image

“here and there though bright spots and streaks shine on the otherwise translucent globe”

these are ice clouds in the frigid planets atmosphere reflecting the sun's rays the planets filmy rings are dotted with tiny white moons in the web picture and another moon floats nearby above Neptune something shines like a Christmas star far outstripping the ghostly planet in brightness

“rays of light emerge from this shining body”

looking just like representations of the fabled star over Bethlehem but this is no star it's Neptune's largest and most unusual moon brightened this moon's surface is covered in ice but it isn't the water ice that we're used to in frozen nitrogen which is extremely reflective tritons frozen surface reflects so much of the light that hits it that it appears extremely bright

that brightness originally led astronomers to think one moon but the observations from Voyager 2 revealed that it's actually slightly smaller triton is unusual in that it orbits Neptune backwards meaning it circles in the opposite direction planets rotation this backwards motion is known as a retrograde orbit priton is the only large moon in our solar system with such a pattern

this odd orbit provides clues to how triton evolved in the early days of our solar system it makes scientists think that triton formed on its own away from Neptune's gravity they speculate that it developed as a kind of baby planet that circled the sun by itself at first far in the outer stretches of the solar system under this hypothesis triton eventually encountered Neptune's gravity and was slowly pulled into orbit around the ice

trident this process might have taken a billion years or more the haunting web telescope image of

triton and Neptune was made possible by incredible advances in technology and engineering these unfolded slowly but steadily in the centuries since Galileo and his peers first pointed their telescopes skyward to begin with new inventions have enabled the telescope to detect light and radiation far beyond that visible to the human eye this allows the web telescope to pick up ancient light that shows the formation of galaxies

“and stars when the universe was young the dawn of space travel has also been key to the evolution”

of telescopes and evolution that has culminated for now in the deployment of the web instrument space

travel is so crucial to the advancement of telescope technology because Earth's atmosphere absorbs

and distorts light this somewhat obscures our view of the universe from the ground

they would need a telescope based in space out beyond our atmosphere

“and thus the Hubble Space Telescope was conceived it wasn't the first telescope to go into space”

there were light collecting instruments on missions from the dawn of the space age Apollo 16 astronauts even took a telescope called the far ultraviolet camera slash

spectrograph to the moon in 1972 they brought back 178 frames of film

showing the universe as observed from beyond Earth's atmosphere the Hubble telescope was however

“the first great space-based telescope astronauts on the space shuttle discovery put the Hubble”

telescope into orbit around the Earth in 1990 it captured pictures of the universe that advanced

scientific knowledge and understanding by leaps and bounds the Hubble telescope was the first of

NASA's so-called great observatories these are several space telescopes that launched the era of space-based observations which in turn has led to ever deeper and more awe-inspiring insights into the universe in 1991 NASA sent its second great observatory into space that was called the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory and it had four telescopes that detected as you might guess from the name Gamma

“rays to understand the term Gamma rays we need to remember that the electromagnetic spectrum”

encompasses various forms of flight these include the visible light we can see and other forms like X-rays radio waves and micro waves Gamma rays are those at the highest energy part of the electromagnetic spectrum outside the range of visible light and close and range to X-rays using the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory scientists detected Gamma rays in space this enabled them to make various discoveries including a new category of galaxies

with supermassive black holes the Compton Observatory was decommissioned in the year 2000 but meanwhile NASA had put another great observatory into orbit this was the Chandra X-ray Observatory which was carried into space by the Space Shuttle Columbia in 1999 Chandra captures images of space by detecting X-rays which are produced at very high temperatures such as when stars explode or matter bends towards a black hole

the last of the so-called great observatories hit the skies in 2003 it was the Spitzer Space Telescope Spitzer detected infrared light which we feel as heat and which is on the other side of the electromagnetic spectrum from UV light X-rays and Gamma rays

it also revealed a whispering of Saturn plus the most distant galaxy ever detected

“it was also with the Spitzer Telescope that observers found the first images of a star system”

with seven planets of about Earth's size called Trappist One other space telescopes followed these successes including the cutting edge

Kepler Telescope in 2009 that boasted a four-foot seven-inch mirror

the Kepler scope searched for other planets in our galaxy outside our solar system

“these are known as exoplanets Kepler searched for exoplanets that were too far away”

to observe directly it did this using an ingenious technique

when distant planets pass in front of the stars they orbit

they cause a slight dimming of the stars brightness from our perspective Kepler detected these dips in the light coming from stars

“in order to identify far away exoplanets NASA used the Kepler Telescope”

to search for Earth-sized planets in what's nicknamed the Goldilocks Sun this is the area around the star where a planet would be not too hot and not too cold to contain liquid water which is necessary from life as we know it on Earth in just six weeks Kepler enabled the discovery of five exoplanets which scientists named Kepler four-be five-be six-be seven-be and eight-be not long ago humans had had no evidence that planets existed anywhere in the universe

outside of our own solar system then in a relatively short span of time the Kepler Telescope went on to reveal planets to be commonplace all over the cosmos meanwhile in addition to NASA other space agencies had gotten into the business of sending telescopes into space too in 1995 the European Space Agency collaborated with NASA on the solar and heliosephoric observatory a mouth full of a name that's known by its acronym SOHO the SOHO spacecraft carries the dozen

instruments including an ultraviolet imaging telescope for observing our Sun in 2001 Sweden, Canada, France and Finland launched a 43-inch radio telescope aboard a satellite called Odin the Italian Space Agency launched a craft with a gamma ray imageer in 2007 and other countries launched various missions in the following years as well in 2013 the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launched another space telescope with a mouth full of a name

the extreme ultraviolet spectroscope for exosphoric dynamics also known as Hissaki Sprint A

descriptively the lunar based ultraviolet telescope by 2014 the European Space Agency and NASA

“had reportedly launched more than 90 space telescopes though only some of those were still operational”

and then three decades after the launch of the trailblazing Hubble Telescope

the incredibly powerful web scope took to the heavens

it joined some 28 other telescopes actively operating in space the web telescope is a science fiction like feat of ingenuity and engineering designed to reveal the cosmos in a glory that Galileo and the ancient observers could only imagine

“the telescope itself is built around a mirror that's more than 21 feet wide”

a long way from Galileo's humble to inch lens

and the telescope is equipped with a huge sun shield the size of a tennis court toward off the sun's rays this is necessary because the telescope operates without the benefit of a protective atmosphere unlike telescopes located on earth

“the web telescope is so large that there was no rocket big enough to carry it into space intact”

instead it launched with its mirror and sun shield folded

then they unfolded out in space it's an awe-inspiring notion to envision the massive structure drifting through the near vacuum of open space majestically unfurling its antennas its silver mirror its massive sun shield then the whole structure circling the sun capturing light from far away and long ago

building the bank of human knowledge expanding the frontiers of science as it slowly plums the mysteries of our magnificent universe what will the coming years of observations bring what new and beautiful images what fresh knowledge and discoveries going forward what other inventions and technologies will carry human understanding to new levels

for now we can only ponder those questions as our ancestors pondered the star studded skies over their heads but one thing seems apparent the potential may be as limitless as the universe itself you

you you you you you

you you you