Students vie to see biggest telescope

ASTRONOMY:A GROUP of Irish students and their teacher will get a chance to visit the world's biggest and most powerful telescope as part of a prize to mark International Year of Astronomy.

The winners of the Faulkes Universe Challenge prize, which was launched at the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition yesterday, will get a chance to visit the Very Large Telescope in the Atacama Desert in Chile next year.

The International Year of Astronomy celebrates the 400th anniversary of the telescope invented by the father of modern astronomy, Galileo Galilei.

The telescope is run by the European Southern Observatory and is located in Chile because it is one of the driest places on earth and at an elevation of more than 2,600m, on top of the mountain Cerro Paranal. It featured as the villain’s lair in the latest James Bond film Quantum of Solace.

The telescope consists of four 8.2m telescopes which together are more powerful than any other telescope in the world, with four billion times the light-gathering power of the human eye – the equivalent of being able to see a human hair from 16km away.

The winners will be chosen from the best projects entered in the Faulkes challenge, which will involve teams of transition year or AS level students in Northern Ireland competing to win time on the Faulkes Telescopes in Hawaii and Australia which can be operated remotely from classroom computers. The challenge aims to promote astronomy in Irish schools.

International Year of Astronomy’s Irish co-ordinator Prof Michael Redfern of NUI Galway said it was “an extraordinarily generous gesture” on the part of the European Southern Observatory because Ireland is not one of the 14 countries involved in the observatory project.

“It is the ambition of any astronomer to spend time on these superb instruments,” Prof Redfern added. “They are by far the best telescopes in the world at the moment. Any astronomer would be jealous of such a prize.”

He said it was important that the students vying for the prize undertake original research under the supervision of a professional astronomer. Entries can be made at www.astronomy2009.ie