New Metamaterial Tiles Improve Sensitivity of Telescopes
Written by AZoOpticsJan 27 2021
New metamaterial tiles designed by a multi-institutional research team will help enhance the sensitivity of telescopes that are being constructed at the distinguished Simons Observatory in Chile.
Researchers developed new metamaterial tiles that will improve the sensitivity of telescopes at the Simons Observatory by absorbing stray light. The top left photo shows one tile, with its anti-reflective surface shown in the insert. The bottom left photos show the back of the tile, and the right photo shows the assembly of 240 tiles installed on the wall of an optics tube. Image Credit: Zhilei Xu, University of Pennsylvania.
And is there anything more extreme than peering back on the infancy of the universe?
Dr. Nicholas Galitzki has spent much of the past four years at more than 17,000 feet in Atacama, Chile. Highly specialized radio telescopes there have been gathering some of the earliest free-floating photons to have escaped the ultra-dense, opaque pudding that had coalesced some 400,000 years after the big bang â the cold, faint echo of creation first identified about 50 years ago and dubbed the cosmic microwave background.
Say what?
Donât worry: Dr. Nick will explain all of that and more at the January edition of Wyoming Stargazingâs âWorld Above the Tetonsâ speaker series, Zooming at you starting at 7 p.m. Friday.
Date Time
Metamaterial Tiles Boost Sensitivity of Large Telescopes
Low-cost, mass producible technology poised to help Simons Observatory yield new insights into how the universe began
WASHINGTON – A multi-institutional group of researchers has developed new metamaterial tiles that will help improve the sensitivity of telescopes being built at the preeminent Simons Observatory in Chile. The tiles have been incorporated into receivers that will be deployed at the observatory by 2022.
The Simons Observatory is the center of an ambitious effort to measure the cosmic microwave background – electromagnetic radiation left over from an early stage of the universe – using some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated ground-based telescopes. These measurements will help improve our understanding of how the universe began, what it is made of and how it evolved into what it is today.
January 12, 2021
New work agrees with older research suggesting the oldest light in the universe – from the most distant galaxy yet known – started its journey toward us 13.77 billion years ago.
View larger. | In 2013, the Planck space telescope released the most detailed map to date of the cosmic microwave background, the relic radiation from the Big Bang. It was the mission’s first all-sky picture of the oldest light in our universe, imprinted on the sky when it was just 380,000 years old. Now a new, independent study agrees with Planck’s results. That’s good news for astronomers trying to pin down the universe’s age and rate of expansion. Image via ESA.
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