New planet-hunting tool chases after star system's little brown dwarf

[longship]

2. Yup! Lenses sag. Plus there's the chromatic aberration problem with passing light through glass.

(Ignoring passing gas through ass, which is an aberration by itself.)

For those who do not know: All big telescopes these days are Newtonian (or other design) reflectors, with curved mirrors, not lenses.

And there are some really big ones in store in the near future.

Behold, the E-ELT, the European Extremely Large Telescope, currently under construction in Chile.


With a 39 meter aperture (that's just a bit under 130 feet for those in the USA, or the scientifically illiterate, but I repeat myself). It will dwarf every telescope that is currently operational.

And yup. It is being built by Europe, not the USA. Just like Europe has the LHC while the USA payed 2 billion dollars to bury the tunnels they spent two billion dollars digging for the Superconducting Supercollider in Texas.

We sent people to the moon. Now we cannot even get them into suborbital, let alone orbital missions. The moon? Hah! Don't even think about a moon base. We'd rather invade Fallujah.

The sun has set on science in the USA, a country which in my lifetime has long since switched to valuing ignorance, fame, and wealth above any knowledge.

It makes me sick even to think of it.