5 Hidden Secrets of the VLT Telescope Revealed

Astrum merch now available!

SUBSCRIBE for more videos about our other planets.

Donate!
Ethereum Wallet: 0x5F8cf793962ae8Df4Cba017E7A6159a104744038

Become a Patron today and support my channel! Donate link above. I can't do it without you. Thanks to those who have supported so far!

#blackholes #eso #astrum

adaptive optics, vlt, interferometry, eso 2023

[Vash-Venture]

That video of the stars circling the black hole was absolutely breath taking. I cant wait for bigger and better telescopes to further reveal the universe to us.

[carpemkarzi]

To be honest the little ‘movie’ of the stars swarming around A* is just jaw dropping given the distance and time involved. Its just..I have no words…

[Equulai]

I visited the VLT site and La Silla site 15 years ago. It was a breathtaking experience and awe-inspiring.

[jadeybabes]

The clips of the stars going around the black hole were utterly incredible to watch - I'd never seen this before! Considering how big they are and the distances involved - this just blows my mind.

[KurtQuad]

I wouldn't mind some deeper dives into the engineering and technology behind the VLT. I could only imagine how amazing an in-depth guided tour of that facility would be. Love the content!

[lanalosangeles]

Note: timestamp 9:30 the closed caption "as shown by Karl Schwarzschild in 1916" is correct; narrator audio error of "as shown by Karl Schwarzchild in 1619".
Fantastic, informative video. Thanks!

[SteedRuckus]

Imagine a "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" final question:

Which telescope is scheduled to come online in 2025?

A. Large Telescope
B. Very Large Telescope
C. Extremely Large Telescope
D. Ridiculously Large Telescope

[oPurpleToasto]

You have such a beautiful and awe-inspiring way of communicating these science and engineering topics. Keep up the great work!

[Baldevi]

I really enjoed this video, and would certainly love more videos of ESO and VLT. ESO has been huge in Astrophysics, both on the ground and in orbit. Fascinating subject, ESO, VLT, and the other programs ESO is an integral part of.

[lovelylady]

This is amazing how we keep on coming up with more advanced ways to prove our own genius! Science is amazing that way.

[एड्वर्डकॅस्ट्रो]

You are one of my favorite channels to see about anything. My daughter has always like astronomy and knew the planet names by the time she was 5 years old. And she knew the position of them so you couldn't confuse her. So when you and your team come out with a new video we see it as a treat and watch it together (she's bit older now).

[cykkm]

To me, the most mindblowing part of the VLT engineering has been its atmospheric-adaptive optics. Twinkle, twinkle, little star, and multi-ton mirrors deform just right in real time to compensate for your twinkling in response! I'm an engineering type, a natural-born tinkerer, despite my working in theoretical science; and this system, designed for a very quick response to changing atmospheric distortions, which are first-class chaotic¹, scale-free and unpredictable, is a nearly unimaginable feat of control system engineering.
Polishing mirrors and balancing the construction on bearing is a significant achievement, but you do it once. But constantly reshaping the mirrors with a response time in milliseconds is a whole another step up in technology!

¹ Incidentally, it was an attempt to model weather phenomena by the MIT atmospheric scientist Edward Lorenz² in the 1960s that led to the discovery of a phenomenon called the chaotic behavior in the real world. He printed so called “checkpoint” values in his numeric simulation with 6 digits after decimal point every hour, because the computer crashed once in a while during his many-months-long simulation (it was the early '60s, and computers were slow), so that he could type them in and continue the simulation from the last printed result. Once he decided to verify that his checkpoints are correct and won't invalidate his many months of work because of a bug. He printed the current numbers, restarted the simulation from an hour-old checkpoint numbers and... got an entirely different set of numbers in an hour! After excluding all sources of error, it was concluded that the culprit was a tiny difference between current simulation step numbers, taken from the previous step directly inside computation, and those printed as a checkpoint. The error—the difference between them—was no more than 1/2 of a millionth in their relative values!
In a public lecture he now-famously explained this with an example: a flap of butterfly's wings in Brazil may cause a hurricane in Texas. This stunning fact caught on, and has become known as the “butterfly effect.”
This is also why a 10-day weather forecast rarely comes true: deterministic, rigorous equations produce divergent results when calculated in a feedback loop, last computed output used as the next timestep input, since they cannot be computed with an infinite precision on the real computer: all computers are limited to only so many digits of precision. Mathematical chaos is a regime that exponentially amplifies every tiny error at each numeric calculation step. Theoretically this behaviour was already known to Poincare, but it had been the first time that it hit us hard in practice: atmosphere and weather is impossible to predict precisely, and the prediction error grows exponentially.
² Not to be confused with and unrelated to Hendrik Lorenz of the special relativistic Lorenz transform fame, who had lived a century earlier.

[JonnoPlays]

The background music has some kind of chime sound that was too loud 🔊

[Felixff]

The scale of our universe is staggering! To see stars orbiting a black hole is certainly fascinating!

[thomasdickson]

@Astrum What a time to be alive! Thanks for making videos like this. Your voice is excellent btw. Our collective minds will surely continue to be boggled by the seemingly exponential speed of progress. I can't wait!

[doug]

I had not heard about the VLT's role in imaging the dance of stars about our supermassive black hole, nor that one of those stars was clocked at over 2% of the speed of light. Thanks so much for this update!

[angelalewis]

The engineering of the whole VLT complex is astounding. It makes me wonder what I am doing with my life. Why am I working on such little projects when such great things are being built? :)

[sborton]

Thank you for highlighting the important work being done with this array. With so much attention being given to the Hubble and now James Webb it is easy to forget about the truly awesome earth based telescopes that exist.

[laurapope]

That was so awesome! Thanks for making such an informative and entertaining video! Until next time, hope y'all have a great day!

[jasonpatterson]

The primary benefit of interferometry is not light amplification - that's a side bonus that is the result of simply using multiple telescopes at the same time. It's *all* about resolution; when interferometry is used it's as if all of the individual telescopes are part of a larger telescope viewing the same thing and the same time. This has been possible for decades with radio telescopes (like the VLA and others, now scaled up to global networks) but doing it with visible light is a major technological feat.