New Technology Telescope

The New Technology Telescope or NTT is an altazimuth Ritchey -Chrétien Cassegrain telescope with a 3.58 - meter mirror.

It belongs to European Southern Observatory, is part of the La Silla Observatory in Chile and was an early pioneer of the technology of adaptive optics. In 1989, the operation of the telescope began. Both telescope as well as the dome design was completely redesigned at that time with regard to optimal image quality. It is located at an altitude of 2375 m at the coordinates 29 ° 15 '32 " S, 70 ° 44 ' 2" W - 29.258917 - 70.733752375.

Properties

The primary mirror of the NTT is flexible and can be moved by actuators during the observation period active in its optimal geometric shape. The secondary mirror may also be actively controlled in three dimensions. Developed by the ESO technology is now used in all major modern telescopes such as the Very Large Telescope and the future E -ELT. The octagonal design of the dome of the NTT is another technological development. The dome is both relatively small, on the other hand, a uniform air flow along the mirror is produced with significantly lower applied turbulence through the flap ventilation system, which leads to a significantly better image quality.

Although this technology in other telescopes, such as the Nordic Optical Telescope has already been installed earlier, it was the NTT, in which the adaptive optics came to full operation for the first time. The name was used for many of the programmatic, some revolutionary features. Special attention was paid to the flow of air on the mirror, on the one hand due to the optimized ventilation system, on the other hand, because of the reduction of heat sources close to the mirror. Even after its construction, a number of developments have been both validated on hardware as well as software at the NTT and built in order to improve its quality and were found later again in the Very Large Telescope.

The New Technology Telescope initially had the same problem as the Hubble Space Telescope with a flawed mirror calibrated. When NTT but the error could be corrected only by the adaptive optics.

Instruments

Currently, the NTT is equipped with two instruments:

• SOFI ( Son of ISAAC, a VLT instrument), a near-infrared camera and a low-resolution spectrograph, with temporally high-resolution polarimeter
• EFOSC2: (ESO Faint Object Spectrograph and Camera, v.2 ), an optical camera and niedrigauflösendem spectrograph with multi - object spectroscopic, polarimetric and koronographischer configurability, formerly also already at the ESO 3.6 m telescope in use

Discoveries

The NTT and its instruments were involved in astrophysically important discoveries such as the resolution of the galactic center, the first observations of solar-like oscillations in a star and the breaking of several distance records in discovery of distant galaxies. It helped with the discovery of a disk around a massive young star, making the puzzle of star formation has been clarified in massive stars and it contributed significant observation results help to clarify the question be changed as asteroids by the solar wind.

Among the most important achievements might include observations of the orbits of stars around the galactic center, which helped to determine the mass and the radius of the supermassive black hole of the Milky Way.