“In 2050 … The first 100 m diameter telescope took shape in a crater on the lunar surface”
VLADIMIR VUSTYANSKY / NASA
The eye that sees all, which entered service in the 2070s, was by far the largest and most powerful optical instrument ever built. Including eight telescopes built on the entire lunar surface, each with a 100 -meter diameter mirror, the effective opening of the complete composite telescope was the size of the entire surface of the moon, allowing unprecedented imaging capacity.
For the first time, we could see the legendary “first light” – the birth of the first stars in the universe. We could also see the surface characteristics of the exoplanets of many light years.
Several proposals had been made in the 2020s for new generation ambitious telescopes, but the capacity of major space projects was not in place. In the 2050s, however, transport to the moon had become routine and affordable, and the construction of the lunar surface was in progress.
It was at this point that an old proposal of 2020 for what was called the Télescope finally large (Ult), with a 100-meter diameter mirror, was dusted and updated.
The Ult leaned on a mirror made not glass, but liquid. The liquid was cheaper to transport to the moon and easier to build and form in a perfectly reflective surface. In the lower gravity of the moon, it was possible to build a much larger mirror than on earth or even in space, where everything that is more than 10 m in diameter caused alignment headaches. The James Webb space telescope, which became operational in the 2020s, had a 6.5 m diameter mirror.
In itself, a single ultimate on the moon was powerful, but not powerful enough to solve the characteristics and physical structures, such as buildings, on exoplanets. Regardless: cunning astronomers had built the ultimate with expansion in mind.
To increase its scope, an intelligent method used for radiotelescopes, called very long basic interferometry (VLBI), has been adapted for use in optical systems. VLBI had been used in 2017 by collaboration on the Horizon event telescopes to capture the first image of a supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy. The EHT worked by combining the entries of eight telescopes on earth to increase the effective size of the telescope.
In 2025, scientists led by Zixin Huang at the Center for Conceered Quantum Systems from Macquarie University in Australia worked a way to use VLBI for optical telescopes. It took a few years for the technical, political and financial obstacles to be eliminated, but serious plans to build an optical telescope the size of the moon were written in 2050 while the first 100 m diameter telescope took shape in a crater on the lunar surface.
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The telescope on the lunar surface fell 13 billion years and imagined first generation stars of high -generation high -generation mass
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In 2075, seven other telescopes were built through the moon. Praised together, they formed a telescope with an effective mirror size of 3000 km.
In the mid -2020s, the James Webb returned over time to see the training of the first galaxies. Now, the complete eye ended has revealed an almost mythical population of stars called population III. The stars are classified into different groups. Population I includes recent stars with an abundance of heavier elements, also known as the high metal content, such as the Sun in the Earth System. The stars of the population II are old and weak in metal, while the stars of the population III are the first after the Big Bang, with a weak metal or no. Big Bang has only created hydrogen and helium, and traces of lithium and beryllium; All other heavier elements had to be forged. The eye that sees the eye rolled up 13 billion years and imagined stars of the first high mass mass generation. Such a giant star, an early star, a blue gargantuan at 100,000 times the mass of the sun, was named Zixin-1 after the astronomer who had done so much to develop an optical vlbi.
The concept of a telescope the size of the moon itself had been carried by a certain number of names. Originally, in 2008, a team from the University of Arizona proposed the lunar telescope of liquid mirror, which finally became the telescope large in 2020. The public, however, complained that the names of these extremely important telescopes and telescopes, the thirty -meter telescope) were too boring. To avoid the choice of Moony McMoonface, the eye that sees everything has been selected as official name. The project has become known by the unofficial nickname of Sauron: super-accessible ultra-resolution optical network.
The installation allowed the imagery of black holes more in detail than ever, but its main objective was to discover if humans are alone in the universe. The structures revealed on exoplanet gliese 667cc, about 22 light years from us, and some of the planets of the Trappist-1 system, about 40 light years, of the suggested extraterrestrial civilizations had evolved in our cosmic backyard. The arguments that some had raised about the cost of building Sauron were never heard again.
Rowan Hooper is the Podcast publisher of New Scientist and the author of How To Spother A Tillion Dollars: the world problems that we can really solve. Follow him on Bluesky
@ rowhoop.bsky.social
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