Scientist Excited by New Telescopes

Nice article at MSNBC about the new generation of space science instruments that are planned or coming on line over the next decade. They could unlock mysteries such as how galaxies form, how solar system formed, and discover terrestrial type planets orbiting other stars.

"Instruments such as the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), the Expanded Very Large Array, the European Extremely Large Telescope and the Giant Segmented Mirror Telescope could answer these questions and raise new ones, scientists said at the "Astrophysics in the Next Decade" conference in Tucson, Arizona, last month.

The instrument many scientists are most excited about, however, is NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), hailed as the successor to Hubble and set to launch in 2013."

The current findings about the beginning of the universe are missing a few pages between the era immediately after the Big Bang when the universe was around a million years old and the formation of the first galaxies when the universe was about a billion years of age. The new instruments, particularly the Webb, might shed light on the formation of these primordial galaxies and determine their chemical composition, perhaps even mapping their early movements.

The Webb telescope would also be capable of finding planets transiting in front of their parent stars, and will be designed to be sensitive enough to see smaller earth type planets and measure their atmospheric composition, temperatures and more accurately determine their mass than current instruments. Webb and the ALMA will also be able to closely examine many of our own system's distant Kyper Belt objects outside the oribit of the planet Neptune, which could help us determine how our own system was formed.

Definitely a good time to be starting out as a young astronomer.