The Giant Magellan Telescope, set to be used at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, will have a resolving power of 24.5 meters, or 80 feet. Scientists may be able to use the observatory to look at giant structures in the Universe, and how planets were formed, among other things. Construction has begun at Mauna Kea, Hawaii and first light is expected in the 2020s. First light date is currently set at 2024.Īlso under consideration is the Thirty Meter Telescope, which would have a collecting area of 30 meters (98 feet). The European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) at Cerro Armazones in Chile is expected to have a working mirror equivalent of nearly 40 meters (131 feet), large enough to probe exoplanet atmospheres in detail. We’ve also included a small list of large telescopes yet to come. It did the first image of an extrasolar planet and also saw the afterglow of the furthest gamma-ray burst astronomers have found. It has four 8.2-meter (27-foot) mirrors and four movable 1.8 meter (5.9-foot) auxiliary telescopes. It’s made some of the most distant observations of water to date.Īnother example of an interferometer is the Very Large Telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. It’s the largest interferometer of its type in the world. This is something that is used, for example, with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), which uses 66 radio telescopes in Chile’s Atacama Desert to do observations of the universe. One method of enhancing an individual telescope’s collecting power is to pair it with others. Their discoveries include refining the Andromeda galaxy’s size and nabbing the first picture of an exoplanet system. It has been used to examine comets and asteroids, exoplanets and even supernovas.Ĭlose behind are the twin Keck telescopes at Mauna Kea in Hawaii, which each have a diameter of 10 meters (33 feet). The largest optical reflector in the world is the Gran Telescopio Canarias in the Canary Islands, whose individual mirror segments create an equivalent light collecting surface to a 10.4-meter (34-foot) mirror. Comparison of the largest optical telescopes in the world. Wikipedia has a list of space observatories, but be sure to double-check the information there for authenticity. There are of course many space telescopes out there, but those are representative of some of the bigger ones. The telescope will observe in infrared and have a 6.5-meter (21.3-foot) mirror, giving even higher resolution to our cosmic searches. Called the James Webb Space Telescope, it is expected to launch in 2018. While Hubble has helped us chart the universe’s expansion and peered deep into time, a bigger NASA telescope is on its way. It has observed frantic star formation in galaxy clusters, spotted a molecule required for water in expiring stars like our Sun, and completed an immense cosmic dust survey. The European observatory launched in 2009 and has racked up several achievements since making it to space. The largest current infrared space telescope is Herschel, which has a 3.5-meter (11.5-foot) primary mirror. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope as seen during the second servicing mission to the observatory in 1997. It has a 2.4-meter (7.9-foot) mirror that, along with other instruments, has allowed it to refine the age of the Cosmos and show that the universe’s expansion is accelerating. A large optical telescope we we have in orbit right now is NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which was launched in in 1990.
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