Scientists have equipped one of the most powerful telescopes on Earth with new technology aimed at learning unprecedented details about how our galaxy formed.
The “William Herschel” telescope, on the Spanish island of La Palma, will be able to scan 1,000 stars per hour in order to classify a total of five million stars.
An ultra-high-speed mapping technology, called Wave, will also be connected to the telescope in order to study the composition of each star and the speed with which it is moving.
The technology reveals how our Milky Way galaxy was built over billions of years.
It took Professor Gavin Dalton, of the University of Oxford, more than 10 years to develop the technology.
Dalton told us he is “very happy” that the technology is ready to do its job.
He said, “It’s a great achievement that so many have participated in, and how wonderful it is to get to work. The next step is a new, wonderful adventure!”
Scientists were able to install the “WIFE” technology on the telescope located on the top of a mountain on the Spanish island of La Palma in the Canary Islands.
The technology consists of 80,000 separate pieces, and it is described as an engineering miracle.
Scientists can determine the locations of thousands of stars in each spot of the sky towards which the telescope is directed. Then comes the “Wave” mission, a technique that uses agile robotic fingers that carefully lays a fiber-optic tube, pointing to a specific star.
These fibers are in fact small telescopes, each of which captures the light from one star, then directs it to another instrument, and then divides it into a rainbow spectrum, containing the secrets of the star’s origin and history.
All of this happens in just one hour, during which time optical fibers from a thousand other stars are placed on the back side of the board, which flips over to analyze the next set of targets once the previous scan is complete.
Our galaxy is a dense spiral of up to 400 billion stars, but it started out as a relatively small group of stars.
The galaxy has grown through successive mergers with other small galaxies over billions of years, as well as the joining of stars from other galaxies to our galaxy, and each merger leads to the formation of an entirely new star.
The Wave technology can calculate the speed, direction, age and composition of each star under study, which essentially creates an image of moving stars in the Milky Way.
It will be possible to understand the entire formation of the Milky Way in unprecedented detail, says Dalton.
“We will be able to trace the galaxies that have merged to build the Milky Way through cosmic time, and see how each merger leads to the formation of a new star.”
Mark Balcells, in charge of the telescope, told the BBC he believed the Wave technology would lead to a major shift in our understanding of how galaxies formed.
He added: “We have heard for decades that we live in a golden age of astronomy, but what we expect in the future is more important.”
“The Wave technology will answer questions that astronomers have been trying to answer for decades, such as how many pieces come together to form a large galaxy, and how many galaxies merge to form the Milky Way,” Balcells said.
Cecilia Farina, instrumentation expert on the project, said she believes the Wave technology will make astronomy history.
She added, “There is a huge amount of detail that we will discover and we did not expect it. The universe is full of surprises.”