Big Bigger Biggest - Telescope HD (S2, Ep. 10)

expands 3,000 meters above the Arizona desert gazing into the night sky it's giant mirrors can pick up light from stars 9 billion light years away thanks to it astronomers can see further into space than ever before the large binocular telescope is the biggest optical telescope on the planet and the culmination 300 years of engineering genius it owes its success to six historic advances in the telescope world at the heart of each lies a major technological innovation eldest Rana MERS to build bigger telescopes one allowed them to grow ever lodge six ingenious leagues for enabled telescopes to grow - bigger it's the world's best you as the Sun sets over the outside desert the large binocular telescope or LBT moves effortlessly into position poverty is david astronomers make their final checks observation is about tonight a team of astronomers led by dr. Richard Greene with gaze inside galaxies on another side of our universe we can look into the cocoons in which new stars and planetary systems are being formed we can look into the hearts of nearby galaxies and we can look at the constituent pieces of galaxies information these observations will help them understand our own soul the LBT is the ultimate leap in a series of historic engineering breakthroughs to understand how astronomers were able to see so far into space we must step back in time our story begins in 17th century England with an earth-shattering invention the reflecting telescope Cambridge University 1669 and brilliant 26 year old mathematician is starting to think about the universe Sir Isaac Newton is one of the most remarkable scientists who ever lived he was capable of addressing a problem and worrying it and worrying it for months and years on end many people of course get bored with something or give something up he had that extraordinary persistence and he starts to work on a number of key problems in physics one such problem is the performance of the telescope astronomers want to study the planets of the solar system but their telescopes aren't up to the job to see these faint distant objects in the night sky telescopes will have to capture more light and for this they will need bigger lenses the purpose of the lens is to focus but a bigger lens leads to big problems for the early astronomers Newton had discovered that shining light through a piece of glass bends the light and splits it into different colors the same thing happens when light is passed through a glass lens but the lens brings each colored focus at a different point these multiple points of focus cause the image to appear blurred the bigger the lens the more the image will appear are to focus in this Cambridge study Isaac Newton believes he's found an answer to the problem a way to make a telescope which produces crystal-clear images without the colors blurring he removes the Troublesome lens and replaces it with something entirely different this is the world's first reflecting telescope made by the young Sir Isaac Newton in 1671 he made it in his rooms in Cambridge from perfectly acceptable ordinary materials of the name cardboard tubes a wooden ball to do the adjusting with but O'Meara replaces the lens dum here Newton's mirror is a metal disk polished into a concave shape it reflects the light from distant objects to a single point a second small amount then bounces the light into an eyepiece because the light does not pass through a thick lens there is no separation of colors and the image is not alone by reflecting the light Newton's telescope produces the sharpest images in the world and that telescope made people's jaws drop in the Royal Society in January 16 72 because it was more powerful and gave a better and clearer image and a conventional telescope of 6 feet long from this point onwards the story of how telescopes evolved is a story of mirrors not lenses getting bigger in the world of telescopes size matters the larger the mirror the more light it can capture the mirrors of the large binocular telescope are as big as they come this telescope consists of two 8.4 meter primary mirrors they collect the Starlight falling on the earth bring them to a focus so we can grasp the very faint signals from these very distant objects by using the mirrors in tandem the astronomers are able to gather twice as much light the light is reflected of the surface each mirror to a single focal point of highly sensitive digital cameras each costing over 1 million dollars then pick up this this is not like commercial CCD camera that you can buy it's optimized for very low light it has four nine megapixel CCD chips in it that record a field of view about the size of the full moon they're in a vacuum can they're cooled to liquid nitrogen temperatures and they're exceedingly sensitive at low light levels rather than trying to collect light from the whole spectrum each camera is finely tuned to detect just half of the colors these pictures are then combined to produce a far higher quality image than could ever be made with a single camera the LBT is light years away from the days when Newton looked at heavenly bodies directly with his eyes back in 1996 before the mirrors and cameras will be made engineers in Arizona began to build an enclosure to protect these precious objects 100 ties the building into the peak night way and provides a platform four huge trolleys mounted a circular track to rotate perfectly Oh school while Newton's prototype is not on the cardboard cheaters the LBT will require over 2000 tons of steel and glass and will take an army of engineers almost years to build back in 1672 Newton's reflecting telescope enabled astronomers to get their first clear view of our solar system but to see deeper into space engineers building the 180 centimeter Parsons telescope in Ireland learn how to make bigger in 1839 Irish astronomer William Parsons begins to design a huge telescope he hopes it will help solve one of the mysteries of deep space astronomers observed strange luminous clouds Parsons wants to find out what they are made where they made up let's say of glowing particles of dust or gaseous matter or were they made up of infinite numbers of stars so far away that you couldn't see a single individual star and only emitted a weak light so what do you do you built a giant telescope to have any chance of capturing the light from his face specs in sky Parsons needs a giant in the time of William Parsons telescope mirrors are concave like shaving males laborious League round by someone who knows all about mirrors is dr. Maggie adaran Pocock an engineer who fits the head to Space Telescope's since her teenage years she's been grinding her own telescope mirrors see with these two pieces of glass if he sprinkles some abrasive powder between them and then rub the two surfaces together if you keep on rubbing and rubbing and rubbing the two surface of the glass change shape the top one becomes concave and the bottom one becomes convex mirrors like this made by hand are actually some of the highest quality mirrors because of the random nature of the movement this random motion means that any slight mistakes will be smoothed out over time to create the perfect concave mirror but Parsons Mira is too big to grind by hand so he designs a machine to the job the metal then he lowers in a boring selfish service and connects which in turn shifts the blinding this you a second will disrupts the study this irregular motion replicates the randomness of the kind you the completed mirror is enclosed not this time in cargo but at the bottom of a great wooden tube 17 metres in length the tube is suspended on chains between two massive stone walls the counter words allow it to be lifted with ease towards the heavens when this chalice note was opened in 1845 one of the great scientific events Victorian England the Great and the good were here scientists philosophers arts people and also to ordinary people it was the inauguration of our most wonderful great machines in the history of science Parsons points his great machine and one of the mysterious luminous clouds in the sky sees not dust but stars today we know that he was looking at the end rahmatan nebula a galaxy laboring ro made up of billions of stars William Parsons telescope actually the great stimulus for the next great giant telescope of the early 20th century and of course into our own day and age it's 1997 whilst the huge rotating enclosure a large binocular telescope is still under construction 150 miles away at the University of Arizona the team tasked with building the 8.4 meter white mirrors have tried to find a way to give them a particular curved shape called a parabola creating a parabola glass is simple so long as you melt the glass first and in here I've got some water which is representing the molten glass of the mirror so I don't reduce to spin it up gently and as it starts going faster and faster the centrifugal forces will move some of the fluid outwards and you get your nice parabolic shape and there we have it the parabolic shape to do this on a large scale technicians at the mirror lab build a giant rotating furnace into which they load 21 tons of glass opticians have to check each piece of the important Japanese glass floors the furnace heats the glass until it melts spinning at seven rotations centrifugal forces push the molten glass into a parabola to maintain this shape as the mirror cools the furnace is kept spinning for another 12-week next the mirrors are polished to create the perfect surface even today the polishing tool is designed to mimic the random action of the human hand normally if you're doing it by hand if you're an amateur telescope maker you rub you have some kind of grip and you rub on this surface to make it as smooth as you can well this polishing tool accomplishes those same things it has pads that you apply to the surface of the mirror and it rubs the mirror these actuators apply a different amount of force moment to moment that changes the shape of that underlying surface that means that each pad is pushing down with a little different force and a little different angle of attack moment to moment as it goes over the surface of the glass in the final stages the polishing tool removes a layer of gloves just 100 abscence thick each time it passes across the desk to complete the process a thin layer of aluminium must be applied to each disk to create the mirrored surface Engineers place the glass disk inside a giant Belgium powerful palms suck out the air to create a flanking loosely on the side of the jet superheat small amounts of as the liquid evaporates molecules of aluminum float through the chamber so the sense of cloud the vacuum ensures the molecules spread evenly across the entire surface to create a flawless reflective mirror when freshly coated the mirrors are able to capture over 90% of the light which enters the telescope after almost four years of spinning polishing and testing the mirrors are finished the outcome was spectacular the deviation from the perfect figure was about 25 nanometers that's about a millionth of an inch and it's as if the Atlantic Ocean had waves no bigger than one inch tall over the entire extent of that ocean so it's a beautiful surface and one that when we put it to use on the sky we see how good it is back in 1845 the mirrors inside passes telescope enabled him to catch a glimpse of the faintest stars in the galaxy but to study distant stars in more detail astronomers building the 250 centimeter hook and telescope in California must find a way to follow them as they move through the night sky at the start of the 20th century astronomers are trying to capture light from the stars so far away and so faint they can't be clearly resolved even when viewed through the most powerful telescope the only way to see them is to photograph when you start to build a telescope for photography you have to bear in mind that you have to get rid of all the natural little compensations the human perception makes the photographic plate is brutal it only records what hits it it filters nothing out the biggest challenge for the astronomers it's keeping these dim specks of light in the viewfinder for long enough to get an exposure the problem is that since the nerve is constantly rotating and the stars stay relatively still the stars appear to move across the night sky and staying fixed on a single star is very difficult Engineers come up with a plan they mount their telescope on a swiveling frame as the Earth spins they rotate the frame in the opposite direction this movement keeps the telescope locked on a single point in the night sky but the telescope designers have to ensure the speed at which the frame rotates it's perfectly in time with the spinning earth if that telescope is not utterly precise as it moves then you get blurs on the photographic plates you don't get individual star images and blurs tell you nothing luckily for the astronomers a machine already exists which works in time the movement for every rotation of the planet the hour hand of a clock goes round the clock face twice so in 1906 the designers of the hooker telescope try using a clock mechanism to rotate their instrument they use it to drive a giant flying five and a half meters in diameter it turns the 100-ton telescope in the opposite direction to the rotating turn with Flora's precision so we've got something literally the size of a big machine much bigger than let's say an American railway locomotive or something like that it's moving with the accuracy of a watch it is Edwin Hubble who captures some of the most incredible images using the hooker telescopes camera this photograph a shot of the andromeda nebula revolutionized our understanding of universe hubble calculates that the nebula is around 1 million light years away much too distant to be part of our galaxy it must form a galaxy of its own Hubble is the first person to prove that ours is not the only galaxy in the universe but one of millions at the large binocular telescope in Arizona the mountaintop enclosure is now but before the two giant mirrors can be installed the team must affect the mat to allow them to move the telescope with flawless precision usually a film of lubricating oil between the bearings would do the trick and demonstrates I have here two plates of glass and they represent the actual bearings themselves on top of the bearing I put a five kilogram weight on these two plates of glass and they're touching and I now try and move the five kilogram weight by applying some force you'll notice that the stick initially bends and of course subsequently breaks now if we repeat the experiment but this time putting on a few drops of lubricating oil in between the glass plates if I now place the glass plate on top you'll notice that the oil spreads out into a very thin film we now put the weight on and we now try and push it and you'll notice that the lightest touch it slides off and falls off so this is the principle a very thin layer of oil with huge forces holding the molecules together these forces are able to withstand massive mechanical weights and thus the bearing is able to work but something as heavy as the large binocular telescope would squeeze out a layer so engineers rest the c-shaped frame on four large path and use high-pressure jets to shoot upwards towards the telescope this constantly replenishes the squeezed and Altoid and provides a thin slippery film on which the telescope float so here we see the motion of this giant structure as it moves in elevation it's the searing is like a rocking chair rocker to drive motors of about five horsepower each on either side are sufficient to move 500 tons of moving weight from Horizon flat out to zenith straight up in a minute back in 1917 the hooker telescope with its precision tracking revealed secrets about the universe astronomers had never dreamed of but in their quest to see further astronomers would have to find a way to get above the urban globe in the late 1920s Edwin Hubble is still measuring the distances to faraway galaxies and has noticed something strange the Stars seem to be moving away from each other this suggests that the universe is expanding astronomers decide to build a telescope big enough to test Hubble's theory this telescope will have a mirror twice the size of any other there is only one glass the USA the required expertise to fill their but the works is on the East Coast oven telescope just like today bright lights of cities such as New York or creating a glow in the skies above and this light pollution makes it difficult to see the stars finally the designers find the perfect location a mountain so far away from city lights it has some of the darkest and clearest skies anywhere in America the only problem is that the mountain is in California over 3,000 kilometers away from the Glass Works in New York State engineers will have to find a way of getting the mirror across America it was a major logistic exercise the whole thing made a great great deal and it was probably the most ambitious piece of glassmaking ever made of course the way of traveling in those days was the railway but there are no rail cars wide enough to transport the 5 meter wide flat and standing the mirror upright would make it too high to fit the mirror vertically on the car designers need to reduce the overall height they shrink the wheels by 18 centimeters then they build a well in the middle of the car so the disc sits just above the rails they line the car with rubber to absorb shocks and way down with steel girders to prevent the top hemming carriage tipping over only now two engineers feel confident to embark on the perilous change as it crossed the continent people turned out in droves to watch it go past people were enchanted by this great spectacle this brilliant piece of American ingenuity crossing the continent but not everyone is enchanted with the mirror as the astronomer after whom the telescope is named soon discovers George Ellery Hale of course was the patron of the great instrument actually made the comment to an American newspaper that with this telescope you could perhaps he's so far back in time to the very earliest galaxies you may see the footprint of the creator you may see the very beginnings of the universe God's creation now rather sadly as it was being conveyed across the continent there were certain very very small fundamentalist groups that didn't like this idea railroad engineers fear that fanatics will take potshots at the mirror as it travels across country so they protected a bulletproof case made for six millimeter thick by June 1948 the massive mirror is safely housed in santosha astronomers begin to use it to test Hubble's theory that the universe is expanding perhaps the most important thing that the Hale telescope told us is that the universe had probably started from the Big Bang the telescope collects enough data to show that all the stars in the universe are moving away from a single point this suggests that everything in existence started at that one point and then a cataclysmic event propelled everything outwards this event was christened 23rd of October 2003 the astronomers at the LBG are eagerly awaiting the delivery of their giant mirrors although they will not have to travel as far as Hales great disc the teams still have to transport them to the top of the mountain over 3,000 metres high this journey also runs the risk of being sabotaged but this time the threat doesn't come from religious fundamentalists it comes from environmentalists we're in the middle of a United States National Forest and when you drive into a National Forest boundary it says land of many uses and it turns out that different groups have different visions for what the use of this mountaintop should be a group of militant environmentalists argue that the telescope has desecrated a national forest suddenly there Roth as a focus the mirror convoy a police escort protects the precious load until it reaches the foot of the mountain once there the team face their biggest challenge the road to the top isn't full of switchbacks and line of troops movers can't cut back a single tree they calculate that if they place the mirror box at an angle of 60 degrees the load will be narrow enough to fit between tree tracks and low enough to clear overhanging branches but with a treacherous climb ahead this precarious angle causes problems winter such a high center of gravity the slightest tilt towards the load to tip flattening trees and destroying to keep the trailer level fit hydraulic pistons John the bangle keep them at the correct angle times near summit wind speeds which are unequal give the cool battle on and the mirror makes it to the enclosure safe and sound in three days they brought up the steel mirror cells at each of the primary mirrors when they were ready and everything arrived in perfect condition so it was a real it was an impressive challenge that was well met and not a single tree was damaged in the process access to high ground gives astronomers a clearer view of the night sky and at high altitude freezing nighttime temperatures create heaven they're delicate temperatures so to locate then you telescope higher than ever before Soviet engineers must find a cool solution to the problem in 1966 the Hale telescope in America is still the biggest in the world and gives the u.s. an unrivaled view of the universe not to be outdone the Soviet Union wants to go bigger higher and even more remote with the Bolshoi telescope they choose the Caucasus Mountains in South Russia but nighttime temperatures up here for well - ten degrees Celsius the thick metal walls of the telescope enclosure lock the heat from the afternoon Sun inside keeping the apparatus wore but when the doors open for observation the cold night air rushes in causing the temperature to drop this cools the mirror down and it begins to contract distorting the perfect surface and blurring the image dr. Maggie a daring Pocock explains how changing temperatures can throw out an astronomers readings now I've got this fruit bowl which represents my mirror what I need to do is going to make a parabola on this surface and to do that I'm going to apply a vacuum so now this curved surface represents the mirror of the telescope now we get light coming in from stars billions of miles away and that's represented by these lasers so just tweak this on and I've got them reflecting onto the parabolic mirror and I can see that can bring the light into a nice tight focus so I bring this screen in now I've got the two points of light focus together on the telescope I've got a nice sharp image the problem is if I introduce some heat to the mirror the two spots of light lose focus they separate and that results in a blurry image which is useless for astronomy now I've taken the heat away from the telescope so this could be opened up the dome in the evening but the two points of light are still separated because I'll take a long time to recover and so this is just a fruit bowl but if we scale this up to a telescope 6 metres in diameter we're talking a long time to bring those two points of light back into focus and that's one of the problems we experienced on the telus game to solve this problem Soviet engineers all showing telescope must keep the temperature of them near a constant they installed next door to them done fans suck in a relatively warm daytime and shoot it over pipe the content guys this calls the air down tonight type temperature hunts down propel the cooler air into the dome reducing the temperature to match conditions outdoors when he enclosure opens in the lead astronomers at the large binocular telescope in Arizona share the same concerns as their Russian counterparts we are on the top of a ten thousand five hundred foot summit which has a very continental American climate in wintertime it gets down to single digits in Fahrenheit - 15 16 centigrade with a good stiff wind and in the summertime it can be as balmy as 60 or 65 fahrenheit in the upper 20s centigrade rather than cooling the whole building the engineers decide to simply cool the mirror itself they take advantage of honeycomb-like cavities built into the back they shoot cold air from tiny jets intimate this cools the mirror from the inside keeping the temperature constant and preventing the front plate of impending that allows us within a very short time to get the front plate that one-inch thick plate of glass that forms the perfect surface of the mirror to be an equilibrium with its surroundings back in 1975 air-conditioned mirrors allowed astronomers of the bolshoi telescope to make accurate observations on even the coldest nights only one more obstacle now stands in the way of the perfect view of the universe to build a large binocular telescope in Arizona astronomers need to find a way of clearing a path through the Earth's dense atmosphere when we look up at the night sky we often see stars twinkling now this is very beautiful for us but it's a real pain for astronomers the twinkling is caused by atmospheric turbulence light actually travels faster through hot pockets rather than cold pockets there and this causes the twinkling what I've got set up here is a laser reflecting off this flat mirror onto this piece of card now if I tell the laser on is here we get a nice steady spot of light now let's introduce some turbulence Maggie places a flame beneath the part of the light to create pockets of hot air or turbulence we can see now that the spot of light isn't steady anymore it's moving around or twinkling and that's the a problem that astronomers face light rays from stars travel through space like waves these waves are always parallel or in phase with each other without the atmosphere the ways of light we've reached telescopes on earth in phase telescope mirrors would be able to focus the light to create a crystal clear image of the star however as a band of light waves it is the earth and the waves passing from areas of what a scanner while those possible colder air this means when they reach telescopes on ground the waves are out of phase with one another leading to the image being blurred telescope designers soon realized that putting their observatories on top of mountains is only going halfway to solving the problems caused by the Earth's atmosphere in a radical move astronomers decide to eliminate the problem real together and liftoff of the space shuttle discovery's their bottom plate and fasten a telescope to a space room why do you want to put a telescope in space the real reason is is totally free from all atmospheric and terrestrial interference it's working in pure vacuum conditions and you have perfect seeing all the time and that's worth the engineering and in my Beauregard's corporation in 1990 a space shuttle discovery carries the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit Discovery's velocity now 4,300 feet per second floating over 500 kilometers above the Earth's surface Hubble is free the amusia story even with a scaled-down mirror Hubble produces breathtaking images of deep space of one momentous photograph the astronomers deliberately train their telescope on a patch of sky that looks empty for an exposure lasting almost a million seconds this is the result the deepest image of the visible universe everting what appeared to be a void contains ten thousand galaxies each with as many as ten billion stars but for all its undeniable qualities Hubble has a serious flaw Mui if one of its instruments fails in orbit engineers have to send up a shuttle to fix out of that line finally I watch in here the I amuse look good the perfect tellus ecology would be land-based yet somehow able to see through the turbulent atmosphere engineers at the large binocular telescope think they have hit upon a way to get crystal-clear images of deep space from the ground their idea is to measure the extent to which the light is distorted by the atmosphere and deliberately to form a second set of mirrors to cancel out the effect these small memories will sit above the main telescope behind them will be hundreds of motorized pissed these will push and pull there is service by a tiny amount the waves of life in the light waves are bounced off of focused into the camera perfect in parallel and backing fails this will allow the LBT to produce images ten times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope when this system is the astronomers will be able to see straight through the atmosphere as if it did not exist - they will not only be able to see distant stars but the planets orbitting by examining these distant worlds they hope to learn and how life on a telescope is one of the Tron one's science indebted to the innovations daring in the past this is the - not window

Channel: Jose From AZ

Views: 550,536

Rating: 4.5142245 out of 5

Keywords: Big Bigger Biggest, Telescope, LBT, Large Binocular Telescope, Safford, Arizona, Mount Graham, Graham County, AZ, Show, Documentary, Space, Technology, National Geographic Channel, Science Channel, television show, Season 2, Episode 10, astronomy, Powerful, Science, Universe, stars, University of Arizona, Ohio State University, Telescope Documentary, Astronomy, worlds biggest, most powerful, Worlds Biggest Telescope, Binocular, Frye Fire, 2017, forest fire, Jose Hernandez

Id: ABRysNzcdvw

Length: 50min 11sec (3011 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 13 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/sandbubba]

Sorry...I REALLY wanted to watch this as it seemed like a verry interesting topic. I just couldn't get past the (unnecessary) graphics and ESPECIALLY the music and sound effects that drowned out the narrator.