Astronomers Capture Sharpest Photos Ever of the Night Sky and Space

We may be getting a sharper and clearer view of the night sky. Astronomers have developed a new type of camera that's churning out some spectacular images, showing us more of the universe than ever before.

The new camera, named MagAO for "Magellan Adaptive Optics", is nearly a twofold improvement over past efforts. So what's the secret behind the sharp images? For the first time, a telescope with a large diameter primary mirror is being used for digital photography at its theoretical resolution limit in visible wavelengths, which is light that the human eye can see.

"It was very exciting to see this new camera make the night sky look sharper than has ever before been possible," said Laird Close, the project's principal scientist, in a news release. "We can, for the first time, make long-exposure images that resolve objects just .02 arcseconds across--the equivalent of a dime viewed from more than a hundred miles away. At that resolution, you could see a baseball diamond on the moon."

In fact, the images are twice as sharp as what the Hubble Telescope can make. This is partly possible because with its 21-foot diameter mirror, the Magellan telescope is much larger than Hubble with its 8-foot mirror. This could mean a far more accurate and stunning view of our galaxy and beyond.

"As we move towards shorter wavelengths, image sharpness improves," said Jared Males, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Until now, large telescopes could make the theoretically sharpest photos only in infrared-or long wavelength-light, but our new camera can take photos that are twice as sharp in the visible light spectrum."

So what sort of things has this new camera seen? It's already made some important scientific discoveries, examining the famous and well-studied massive star that gives the Great Orion Nebula most of its UV light. Named Theta 1 Ori C, this star has been previously known to be a binary star pair made up of two stars called C1 and C2. Yet their separation is so small that before now, astronomers haven't been able to resolve the pair in a direct telescope photo. Now, though, scientists have used the new camera to see the two stars.

What else can the camera do? The researchers also used the new camera to estimate the mass of one of the few stars in Orion with a rare "silhouette disk." This allowed them to learn a little bit more about the distribution of gas and dust in young planetary systems.

"The disk lies in front of the bright Orion nebula, so we can see the dark shadow cast as the dust in the disk absorbs background light from the nebula," said Kate Follette, one of the researchers involved in the study, in a news release. "Picture a moth flying across a bright movie screen: Its body will appear opaque, while the wings will be partially transparent. Our SDI instrument allows us to peer into the silhouette and trace how much dust is at each location in the disk based on how transparent or opaque it is."

These aren't the only finds that the camera is likely to make. The new camera is a huge leap forward for astronomers. With it, they can study different phenomena in the cosmos, learning a little bit more about space.

Want to see the images that the MagAO has captured so far? Check them out here.