Mirrors of creation

By T.C.

SCIENCE is frequently beautiful. But often, that beauty is familiar only to its practitioners. The physical sciences, especially, tend to reveal their charms only to those who can speak the spare and elegant language of higher mathematics in which they are conducted. Astronomy is one notable exception. Away from the light pollution of the cities, the night sky is a gorgeous sight in its own right. Training a telescope on it can produce scientifically valuable data. But it also dramatically amplifies the aesthetic experience.

March 13th marks the formal commissioning of the Atacama Large Millimetre Array (ALMA), a 66-dish radio telescope located high in the Chilean desert. It is the biggest radio telescope in the world, designed to explore the universe at wavelengths invisible to the human eye. Among other things, astronomers hope that ALMA will reveal the birth of stars and planets in unprecedented detail and allow them to probe the chemistry of the vast dust clouds that exist between the stars. Many of the images it generates will be aesthetically magnificent as well.

This slide show traces a potted history of the telescope. Galileo Galilei, a pioneer of telescopic astronomy, used his primitive instrument to sketch the surface of Earth's moon and to discover four of the moons of Jupiter, thus helping to cast doubt on the Earth-centred theory of the universe. Modern instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope are just as mind-expanding. The Hubble's Deep Field series of pictures, which show thousands of galaxies in a tiny slice of sky, each full of billions of stars, are responsible for generating hundreds of scientific papers and for viscerally demonstrating the vastness of the cosmos to hundreds of millions of people.

And the best may be yet to come. Telescope technology is always advancing, and the images generated by future instruments such as the James Webb Space Telescope or the European Extremely Large Telescope are likely to be more revealing—and astonishing—still.

Correction: Many people have pointed out that Galileo discovered four of Jupiter's moons, not three as we originally said. How embarrassing!