A research team at the University of Arizona has captured the most precise images of the nights sky seen so far.
The Magellan Advanced Optics, or "MagAO," is a specialized telescope filter that narrows details to .02 arcseconds -- equivalent to seeing a baseball diamond on the moon.
The improvement is thanks to a shape-shifting secondary mirror that corrects the imperfections of Earth’s atmosphere. It can do this almost in real time -- 585 points on the mirror can change their positioning as fast as 1,000 times per second. This makes for the clearest visible-light images ever recorded -- twice as sharp as images from the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope.
The mirror is placed above an existing telescope’s primary mirror on its own magnetic field and then adjusts incoming light to provide a clearer image. Astronomers used MagAO to look at the two separate stars that belong to a binary star 1,500 light years away. No previous telescope has been able to show this distinction.
Astronomers are using the system on one of the twin Magellan telescopes at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. All their pictures and explanations were published in The Astrophysical Journal.