Astronomers are using the Very Large Telescope (VLT, which google tells me also stands for Vita Lemon Tea, Venice Little Theatre, and Varrio Loco Town), which is currently the biggest telescope on Earth, with a combined aperture of 16.4 meters (it is several units combined) to shoot lasers into space. This is a good thing; our atmosphere is constantly changing (sidenote: this is what causes stars to twinkle) so astronomers have to measure distortion in whichever time and direction they want to observe. The laser creates an artificial star and the feedback allows the telescope to deform its mirror to account for this distortion. From the outside, the laser would appear only as a faint star.
Also there was a wiki link to Star Wars, so fun fact: Luke Skywalker’s original name was Luke Starkiller.
No comments:
Post a Comment