Quicksilver astronomy
IT’S NOT THE LARGEST TELESCOPE in the world. It’s not at the best possible site. And it can only look straight up, towards the zenith. But at just over US$2 million, the nearly completed 4-metre International Liquid Mirror Telescope (ILMT) in northern India is cheap. So cheap, in fact, that it may usher in a new era of observational astronomy. As the very first liquid mirror telescope that will actually be used for regular astronomical research, the ILMT could pave the way for a slate of successors — maybe even on the farside of the Moon.
The principle is simple. Fill a basin with mercury (also known as quicksilver) and set it spinning. Due to the combination of gravity and the centrifugal pseudo force, the shiny liquid metal will adopt a paraboloidal surface — the ideal shape to focus the light of distant stars. Place a camera at the focal point, and there’s your zenith-pointing telescope.
However, building the ILMT has turned out to be anything but simple. The project has a chequered history, with endless delays. “We just never wanted to give up,” says principal investigator Jean Surdej (University of Liège, Belgium).
Fits and starts
People have been thinking about liquid mirror telescopes for more than 150 years (see sidebar, page 30), but Surdej hadn’t paid any attention to the concept until 1996. At that time, he worked at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, studying quasars and gravitational lenses. One day, astrophysicist Ermanno Borra (Laval University, Canada) approached him. “Ermanno was developing mercury mirrors
