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LobsterVision: A New Way of Looking at Outer Space

Posted Apr 19, 2006 at 05:58PM by KJM Listed in: Astronomy
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Modern x-ray telescopes are limited in that they can only survey narrow sections of the skies at one time. A new design, based on the structure of a lobster's eye, is promising to change that.

The lobster - a crustacean distantly related to the scorpion - has a pea-sized eye with millions of perforations that allow light to enter from all directions.  The new Lobster All-Sky X-ray Monitor (currently in design phase) will have a spherical telescope "eye" made from 360 "microplates." Each microplate is a virtual bundle of 3 million parallel glass channels, each of which works as its own x-ray lens, which focuses light rays when they strike at very shallow angles. This will enable the new telescope to look everywhere at once, thus catching cosmic events older x-ray telescopes might miss. "In astronomy, you have to look in the right place at the right time; and that means either having to get lucky or to look everywhere at once. Our instrument goes for the looking-everywhere-at-once tactic," says Dr Nigel Bannister, of the University of Leicester in the U.K.

[Via BBC] Permalink  |   Email this  |   Linking Blogs   |   Digg It!

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