Astrophysicists to create biggest telescope

Astrophysicists from Cambridge and New Mexico are to join in creating the world's most ambitious optical astronomical telescope array based on a concept pioneered in the UK.

The Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer will be composed of several telescopes spread out over an area larger than a football pitch and optically linked together to form a single "synthetic aperture" 400 metres in diameter.

This huge size will yield images with much greater clarity than is available from any single telescope. It produces images 100 times sharper than the Hubble space telescope and, for the first time, enables scientists to watch the final moments of dying stars, study the formation of planets around other stars and get close to the heart of active galaxies.

The Cambridge team is led by Dr Chris Haniff and Dr David Buscher of the Coast Optical Interferometry Group at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge. Coast - the Cambridge Optical Aperture Synthesis Telescope "“ revolutionised telescope design when created in the 1990s by pioneering the technique of linking an array of smaller telescopes in order to produce sharper images.

The Magdalena Ridge Observatory Interferometer (MROI) is seen as Coast's natural successor. Although similar projects are planned elsewhere in the world, the MROI will be unique in its ability to make true images of complex astronomical objects at much faster speeds than the other arrays.

The instrument will comprise 10 optical/infrared telescopes, each with a diameter of 1.4m and separated by distances of up to 400m. The signals from each telescope will be combined in a laboratory at the centre of the array, forming images equivalent to those obtained from a space-based telescope with a diameter of 400m; the Hubble space telescope has a diameter of 2.4m.

Dr Haniff said the collaboration would bring unique opportunities to astronomers in the UK and the US. "The realisation of the MROI will represent the culmination of our efforts, initiated in the 1980s, to apply the ideas of radio astronomy to optical astrophysics," he declared.