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Hale Telescope Essay

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Throughout the history of human civilization humans have tried to find connections between the observations of the sky and their ideas about the nature of the universe. People have always been enchanted by the stars and their endless number. The mathematical meaning of infinity was attributed to ancient Greek philosopher Archimedes. After Galileo invented the telescope which allowed him to discern innumerable number of stars in the galaxy, astronomers had acquired a powerful tool to investigate celestial phenomena and objects. Since then, many scientists have tried to create a model of the universe that could be used to explain its nature and calculate its characteristics. The emergence of more powerful telescopes allowed astronomers to discover …show more content…

Palomar was launched. At that time, it was the world’s largest and most powerful telescope. According to Dr. Ira S. Bowen, director of observatory, Hale telescope is able to photograph stellar objects that are located billions of light years away from our planet. Data received with this instrument enabled the scientists to significantly expand the limits of their knowledge of the universe. It became obvious that the universe is much larger than astronomers previously thought. The most remote objects that prior telescopes could register were only 109 light years away from the Earth. Notable stellar object 3C-147 was discovered using Hale telescope. Later this object was qualified as a quasar, which is used to describ the most distant nucleus from the earth with high energy. Apparently, this object is located so far away that scientists could not give its accurate distance in light years. However, astronomers stated that 3C-147 has red shift of 54.5%. Cosmological red shift is a physical phenomenon due to the expansion of the universe and the measurement of the red shift gives the approximate distance estimation of a nucleus from the earth. The discovery of such distant object showed that estimates of the size of the universe, made by scientists of the 1920s, were inaccurate. For example, 3C-147 is located outside the Einstein universe since the curvature radius of the universe, estimated by astronomers of the 1920s, was less than the distance to the

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