Eyes to the skies getting bigger and bigger

By Seth Borenstein

updated 8:01 p.m. ET Feb. 4, 2008

WASHINGTON - A telescope arms race is taking shape around the world. Astronomers are drawing up plans for the biggest, most powerful instruments ever constructed, capable of peering far deeper into the universe — and further back in time — than ever before.

The building boom, which is expected to play out over the next decade and cost billions of dollars, is being driven by technological advances that afford unprecedented clarity and magnification. Some scientists say it will be much like switching from regular TV to high-definition.

In fact, the super-sized telescopes will yield even finer pictures than the Hubble Space Telescope, which was put in orbit in 1990 and was long considered superior because its view was freed from the distorting effects of Earth's atmosphere. But now, land-based telescopes can correct for such distortion.

Just the names of many of the proposed observatories suggest an arms race: the Giant Magellan Telescope, the Thirty Meter Telescope and the European Extremely Large Telescope, which was downsized from the OverWhelmingly Large Telescope. Add to those three big ground observatories a new super eye in the sky, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2013.

With these proposed giant telescopes, astronomers hope to get the first pictures of planets outside our solar system, watch stars and planets being born, and catch a glimpse of what was happening near the birth of the universe.

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"We know almost nothing about the universe in its early stages," said Carnegie Observatories director Wendy Freedman, who chairs the board that is building the Giant Magellan Telescope. "The GMT is going to see in action the first stars, the first galaxies, the first supernovae, the first black holes to form."

When scientists look at a faraway celestial object, they are seeing it as it existed millions and millions of years ago, because it takes so long for light from the object to reach Earth.

Current telescopes are able to look back to when the universe was about 1 billion years old. But the new telescopes will be so powerful that they should be able to gaze back to a couple of hundred million years after the Big Bang, which scientists believe happened 13.7 billion years ago. That's where all the action is.

"We hope to answer these questions: Are we alone in the universe? What is the nature of dark matter and dark energy in the universe?" said astronomer Henri Boffin, outreach scientist for the European Southern Observatory.

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