Image Cache: Set lasers to star mode. The European Southern Observatory’s Paranal Observatory in Chile now has four powerful laser beams with which to create artificial stars in the night sky.
Browse through the cool photos, animations and diagrams in Gizmodo’s Image Cache here.
Engineers at the observatory have been testing the system since last September. The first successful use of the lasers yesterday marked the birth of the most powerful laser guide stars ever used for astronomy.
The cutting-edge laser system, called 4 Laser Guide Star Facility (4LGSF), shoots four impressive 22-watt beams at the sodium wavelength of 589 nanometres. Each beam is 30cm wide. Thankfully they won’t be used for annihilating planets, though, as ESO explains:
The Four Laser Guide Star Facility (4LGSF) shines four 22-watt laser beams into the sky to create artificial guide stars by making sodium atoms in the upper atmosphere glow so that they look just like real stars. The artificial stars allow the adaptive optics systems to compensate for the blurring caused by the Earth’s atmosphere and so that the telescope can create sharp images. Using more than one laser allows the turbulence in the atmosphere to be mapped in far greater detail to significantly improve the image quality over a larger field of view.
Image: ESO/S. Lowery
Image: ESO/G. Hüdepohl
Image: ESO/S. Lowery
Image: ESO/G. Hüdepohl
Image: ESO/G. Hüdepohl
Image: ESO/F. Kamphues
Top image: ESO/F. Kamphues