An owl can see better at night because the pupils of its eyes are larger than ours. Imagine having a pair of eyes, each 27.6 feet wide. What could you see then? That’s what University of Arizona scientists are hoping to discover once their large binocular telescope n of LBT n becomes fully operational late this year atop Mount Graham near Safford.

The $120 million instrument will become the world’s most powerful telescope with its two primary mirrors achieving better clarity than the Hubble Space Telescope. Unique in design, the two giant 8.4- meter primary mirrors that comprise the scope are mounted side-by- side to work in tandem, producing a collecting area equivalent to an 11.8-meter (39 feet) circular aperture. More impressively, aided by adaptive optics n needed to compensate for atmospheric distortion n the effects of the two mirrors, working together, will achieve the resolution equivalent to a single 22.8-meter mirror telescope, something impossible to construct with today’s technology.

By way of comparison, the large telescope atop Kitt Peak National Observatory is 4 meters.

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So while owls may hunt rodents n or endangered red squirrels n on the mountain, these much bigger eyes have higher prey in mind, according to Peter A. Strittmatter, president of the LBT Corporation.

“We are extremely excited by the prospect that we can now observe the Universe from the earliest epochs of galaxy formation, as well as provide major new capabilities for the study of exo-solar planets, and the possibility of life outside our solar system,” Strittmatter said late last year when one of the two innovative mirrors saw “first light.”

Of course such statements are not without precedent. In recent years, many astronomers and physicists seem to have developed a fanatical competitive spirit, due to recent discoveries that raise question marks the size of planetary nebula.

Questions such as why the universe is actually accelerating outward, where the missing dark matter and dark energy is to account for this, and what the origin and fate of the universe may be, not to mention its shape and extent.

For its own part in this new quest of discovery, the UA is certainly a leader. In addition to collaborating with NASA in planetary science and the engineering of spacecraft instrumentation, the UA’s Steward Observatory Mirror Laboratory has become the country’s premier facility for the design and polishing of many of the world’s largest telescope mirrors. It is one of the reasons, in addition to the association and proximity of the Kitt Peak National Observatory, that Tucson has been dubbed the “Astronomy Capital of the World.”

Now, with both of the LBT mirrors completed, the Steward Mirror Lab has already begun casting and polishing one of seven identical 8.4 meter mirrors that may comprise the Giant Magellan Telescope, a risky and ambitious venture scheduled for hopeful completion in ten years time, should the technology needed to complete it be realized.

The radical design of these mirrors at the UA is thanks to team quarterback Roger Angel, for a lightweight honeycomb structure that incorporates 1,700 ceramic cores molded into the glass, then later removed from the 27 foot behemoth to save weight and to allow the mirror to acclimate faster, thereby providing better images.

Understandably, the lab’s 2,130-degree furnace must first spin-cast the 20 tons of glass into a parabolic shape at 5 revolutions per minute, then slowly cool it. Only at the end can the mirror be polished to an accuracy of 30 nanometers, or about 3,000 times thinner than a human hair, before a coating of reflective aluminum is applied.

While the technology involved in observational astronomy is almost as complex as quantum mechanics itself, nothing here can proceed in a vacuum. Collaboration is needed on all levels, and again n like sports n a team’s players may come from out of state or even out of country.

In this, “Team LBT” is no exception. Work on the design was done by the Instituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (National Institute of for Astrophysics) in Rome, Italy. Other work was contributed by a German holding company, a consortium of observatories led by Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg. Other sources for LBT Corp’s funding and engineering are as diverse as both the Astrophysical Institute of Potsdam and Ohio State University, which is building the Multi-Object Double Spectrograph (or MODS), with help from the Research Corporation, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Virginia.

Once the scope is regularly producing science early next year, a new definition of “awesome” might just come into being. This is especially true for those few able to view the sights first.

As LBT project director Dr. Richard Green recalled, “The awesome thing to me is that when these black holes ‘light up’ in the heat of gluttony, they radiate more than a trillion times the power of the Sun out of a volume the size of the inner solar system. Such events can be seen back to the earliest times in the universe, and provide markers for where giant galaxies were once being formed. But when I was a student, I would sometimes just stop for a moment to realize that the light I had just recorded—marking the discovery of a new distant quasar n left that object before the Earth was formed, only to arrive in my camera that night.”

Regarding the LBT Corporation, and what member scientists who win time on the current most powerful telescope in the world, Dr. Green adds, “The results of more than twenty years of professional and personal effort made by dedicated scientists like Dr. Hill will see successive calibrations produce more capabilities, with scientific instruments and secondary mirrors that change their shape a thousand times a second to cancel the blur of the atmosphere. The culmination of all this will be when the beams from the two giant primary mirrors are combined and phased, so that we achieve the ultimate sharp image.”

Does size matter? If so, what does that even mean? And what is gravity? What is time?

These are questions that not even Strittmatter or LBT director Richard Green can answer. Yet. Not even Einstein knew the whole truth of it, and he was Time magazine’s “Man of the Century” last time around.

E-mail comments for publication to editor@azbiz.com. Jonathan Lowe lives in Tucson and is author of the medical thriller “Geezer.”

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