A newly developed camera took the sharpest-ever photos of the night sky, and the results are breathtaking.
This is the first camera that uses a large diameter primary mirror to produce images visible to the naked eye, a University of Arizona press release reported.
"It was very exciting to see this new camera make the night sky look sharper than has ever before been possible," University of Arizona astronomy professor Laird Close, the project's principal scientist, said in a statement. "We can, for the first time, make long-exposure images that resolve objects just 0.02 arcseconds across - the equivalent of a dime viewed from more than a hundred miles away. At that resolution, you could see a baseball diamond on the moon."
The images are about twice as sharp as what can be captured through the famous Hubble Telescope.
"Until now, large telescopes could make the theoretically sharpest photos only in infrared - or long wavelength - light, but our new camera can take photos that are twice as sharp in the visible light spectrum," Jared Males, a NASA Sagan Fellow at the UA's department of astronomy, said.
Atmospheric turbulence tends to blur telescope images, a research team set out to correct that problem.
The researchers "developed a very powerful adaptive optics system that floats a thin (1/16th of an inch) curved glass mirror (2.8 feet across) on a magnetic field 30 feet above the telescope's primary mirror."
The mirror can change its shape 1,000 times every second, which helps to counteract the blurring effect.
"As a result, we can see the visible sky more clearly than ever before," Close said. "It's almost like having a telescope with a 21-foot mirror in space."
The revolutionary telescope, called "Magellan Adaptive Optics" (MagAO), has already made some interesting discoveries.
A star called Theta 1 Ori C, was actually believed to be two stars. They were so close in proximity (about the distance between Earth and Uranus) that astronomers had never been able to distinguish between the two in an image.
"I have been imaging Theta 1 Ori C for more than 20 years and never could directly see that it was in fact two stars," Close said. "But as soon as we turned on the MagAO system it was beautifully split into two stars."
The telescope also answered another questions: "How do how planets form from disks of dust and gas affected by the strong ionizing light called stellar wind coming from a massive star like Theta 1 Ori C, which has about 44 times the mass of the sun?"
The team used MagAo to observe red light created by ionized hydrogen gas to see how 1 Ori C's wind and dust affected nearby stars.
"Close to Theta 1 Ori C, there are two very young stars surrounded by disks of gas and dust," Ya-Lin Wu, a graduate student and lead author on one of the publications, said. "Theta 1 Ori C pummels those disks with stellar wind and UV light. It looks like they are being bent backwards by a strong wind."
The telescope's images revealed the protoplanetary disks getting pulled into a teardrop shape by the strong UV Light and wind.
