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New telescope exceeds Hubble view by 300K

American scientists have successfully tested an X-ray telescope expected to

exceed the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope by 300,000 times.

As reported in Nature, the telescope has been developed by a team from NASA and the University of Colorado led by Professor Webster Cash of the University's astrophysical and planetary sciences department.

"A visible-light telescope with the resolution of this newly designed X-ray telescope could be used to count the hairs on an astronaut's head while she was standing on the moon" says Professor Cash.

According to Cash, this new telescope also has the potential to resolve the 'event horizon' of a supermassive black hole in the centre of our galaxy or a nearby galaxy.

"This new breed of telescope has the capability of bringing distant objects in the universe to our doorstep...we will see the discs of stars, image the formation of astrophysical jets and watch blobs of matter spiral into black holes."

Professor Cash said the human eye can resolve objects in detail as fine as 1 "arc-minute," or 60 arc-seconds and by the mid-twentieth century, advanced telescopes were resolving images to 1 arc-second - about the size of a coin seen from three kilometres away. Hubble increased that resolution by 10-fold, to about 0.1 arc-second.

The development of radio telescopes in the 1960's allowed astronomers to resolve images as fine as .001 arc-seconds - as if the observer were 100,000 times closer to the object, said Cash.

The new X-ray telescope combines signals from different mirrors using a technique called interferometry.

Interferometry involves combining light collected by multiple telescope mirrors to essentially create a much larger telescope, he said. While some ground-based radio telescopes working in concert are located thousands of miles apart, Cash and his team used a tabletop prototype at Marshall Space Flight Centre that included four flat mirrors.

The two sets of mirrors mixed the "wavefronts" of the X-rays, causing them to cross and create "interference fringes," he said. The fringes, which are amplified recombinations of the beams, produce much sharper images - much like sound waves can be combined to amplify music.