New Space Telescope, 40 Times The Power Of Hubble, To Unlock Astronomy’s Future
“But these potential discoveries are what we know we’re going to be looking for. With every new major technological leap forward we’ve ever taken in astronomy and astrophysics, the greatest achievements of all have been the ones we could not have anticipated in advance. The great unknowns of the Universe, including what it looks like in the faintest regimes, how the most distant stars, galaxies, gas clouds, and the intergalactic medium behaved at early times, and what it looks like beyond anything we’ve ever seen will all be exposed for the first time. It’s possible that we’ll learn we were quite arrogant and wrongheaded in a great multitude of arenas, but we’ll need this new, high-quality data to show us the way.”
If you were an observational astronomer, what would your dream telescope look like? It would have to be huge, with an incredible amount of light-gathering power. The quality of the optics would have to be pristine, and higher-precision than anything ever created before. It would have to have multispectral capabilities, extending beyond both sides of the visible light spectrum. And it would have to be in space, with no interference from our atmosphere. If we could build a telescope like that, so many things would immediately become possible. We’d be able to directly image perhaps 100 exo-Earths around nearby stars, including spectra of their atmospheres. We’d take images of Jupiter of the same quality that JUNO can, but from Earth’s orbit. We’d be able to measure the star clusters inside and gas halos surrounding every galaxy in the Universe to just a few hundred light year-precision. And we’d be able to take high-resolution images of the faintest, most distant galaxies of all, in just a tiny fraction of the time it’s taken Hubble to do it.
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