Bursting the Hubble Bubble: Powerful Ground-Based Telescope Will See Further and Clearer than Hubble
upstart writes:
The MAVIS instrument will be fitted to one of the eight-meter Unit Telescopes at the European Southern Observatory's (ESO's) Very Large Telescope in Chile, to remove blurring from telescope images caused by turbulence in Earth's atmosphere. MAVIS will be built over seven years at a cost of $57 million.
MAVIS stands for MCAO Assisted Visible Imager and Spectrograph. MCAO stands for Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics.
[...] MAVIS Principal Investigator Professor Francois Rigaut, from the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, said atmospheric turbulence is like the phenomenon of objects appearing blurry on the horizon during a hot day.
"MAVIS will remove this blurring and deliver images as sharp as if the telescope were in space, helping us to peer back into the early Universe by pushing the cosmic frontier of what is visible," he said.
"The ability to deliver corrected optical images, over a wide field of view using one of the world's largest telescope, is what makes MAVIS a first-of-its kind instrument, and means we will be able to observe very faint, distant objects.
"We will be able to use the new technology to explore how the first stars formed 13 billion years ago, as well as how weather changes on planets and moons in our Solar System."
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.