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A new telescope in the Southern Hemisphere officially opened its giant eye to the universe today, with researchers already showing off some new pictures that reveal objects not seen before. The Gemini South Telescope, on the summit of Cerro Pachon in the Chilean Andes, will pair with the seasoned Gemini North, on Hawaii's Mauna Kea, to provide complete coverage of the sky with some of the most powerful optics known.
Philip Lucas of the University of Hertfordshire used the new southern telescope to generate an infrared image of the Trapezium region of the Orion Nebula. The picture shows several bright and dim stars, as well as colorful, billowing clouds of gas and dust.
Lucas said a number of very faint sources of light show up in the picture, objects that were not detected in previous work with smaller telescopes.
"These may be isolated planetary mass objects with masses only a few times larger than Jupiter, but the data will have to be carefully analyzed before we can be sure," Lucas told SPACE.com.
Lucas said the combination of the two observatories opens new opportunities for comprehensive sky studies.
"For me it means I can look at any star formation region in the sky to search for very low-mass objects and study the nebulae that surround very young stars," he said. "If there were only one telescope, then nearly half of the interesting objects in the sky would be out of my reach."
Gemini South, like its northern twin, has a 26-foot (8-meter) primary mirror. Few telescopes are larger. Both observatories sit on high mountains known for clear air that is relatively free of the water vapor that obscures observations from lower elevations. Gemini North sits at about 14,000 feet and the southern one is nearly 9,000 feet up.
The observatories also feature adaptive optics, complex imaging systems that deform a small secondary mirror to cancel out blurring effects that still exist, even at high altitudes. It's the same problem that makes stars appear to twinkle to the naked eye.
The telescopes work in both optical and infrared wavelengths, allowing them to make traditional pictures as images that show heat emitted by dust and other hard-to-observe things.
Observations have been going on at Gemini South for some weeks already.
"About a month ago we reached a milestone when both Gemini North and Gemini South made observations at the same time but in different parts of the sky invisible to each other," said British astronomer Matt Mountain, director of the project.
The capability of Gemini North, which has been operational since 1999, was illustrated earlier this month when astronomers announced the telescoped had helped discover a brown dwarf star orbiting surprisingly close to a larger, normal star. The finding changes what scientists know about what sorts of objects can form, in what configurations, around stars.
The telescopes were built by a partnership of seven nations: the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Chile, Australia, Argentina and Brazil. Gemini South is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under a cooperative agreement with National Science Foundation, which oversees the observatories.
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