Hertford and the unfeasibly large telescope

19 June 2014

Professor Pat Roche, Hertford Tutor in Physics, is one of a team of scientists working on the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). He’s interviewed on the BBC Today programme, describing the new telescope that will be built into a hill in Chile:

It will have two fantastic attributes, one is it’s the largest telescope of its kind to be built anywhere in the world and so it can gather more light, that is coupled with the fact that a large telescope can see more detail and so that combination of enormous light grasp and exquisite resolution, which allows you to see much sharper images than any other telescope, will enable us to see both more detail in nearby objects like the discs out of which solar systems are forming to the furthest galaxies at the edges of the universe…’

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b046ntnx

[c.39:55 on the clock]