Future giant telescopes

[nytecam]

Had a great lecture Friday night at our Society by Prof Michael Merrifield - Nottingham Uni UK on "21st century telescopes" that included the 42m European - Extremely Large Telescope due for first-lght in next decade - see http://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/e-elt.html

Already there's a spin-off from the new polishing techniques used to make the Keck-like mirror segments that minimises stress immediately below the mirror surface. This technique already used to improve plastic hip joints with twice the life of those currently made thus minimising further operations for patients.

Mike also spoke about future very large millimetre radio-telescope arrays destined for radio-quiet South Africa and/or Western Australia to detect [amongst many things!] distant pulsars on the far side of our Milky Way - these super accurate 'clocks' could turn our galaxy into a 'time-telescope' to detects the distortion of time-space caused by gravitational-waves passing through the galaxy - imagine a pond [=our galaxy] filled with plastic ducks [=pulsars] - drop in a stone [=blackhole merger] and the ducks 'bob' sequencially out from the source - all pretty exciting stuff

The only downside of the evening was science funding when so few MPs with any concepts of science or the many spin-offs when it comes to funding. Only one example given above but many others were quoted.