Why Do Spinning Liquids Make Great Telescopes?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 3 ธ.ค. 2022
- Why Liquid Mirrors Make Great Telescopes
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I visited the mirror making lab at the University of Arizona and they actually use this exact technique to speed up the manufacturing process. They pour liquid glass into a rotating mold, and as the glass cools it forms a more or less perfect parabola. They then use traditional sanding techniques to grind out any imperfections until the mirror is basically perfect
4 minutes and 20 seconds 🗿
Largest liquid mirror telescope is being built in India...
Guy looks like he's in pain😂😂
Couldnt you just wait for the gallium to solidify?
That demonstration with the blue water in a parabola was really cool
Fun fact:- India has the Asia's largest liquid mirror telescope.
After reading about liquid metal telescopes in a science magazine about 40 yrs ago, I obtained and kept a 10 lb bottle of mercury around hoping to one day build one. As I got older, my sense of responsibility outpaced my scientific ambitions and I took it to a mercury recycling center.
The amount of knowledge humanity already possesses about the cosmos is both humbling and awe inspiring
There is a similar technology called liquid lenses. There you have two transparent oils with different refractive index in an electric field, and based on the voltage the interface between the two oils bends differently and acts like a lens. This was used in some early autofocus webcams back in the day.
This principle has revolutionized the production of very large telescope mirrors. Most 8-meter mirrors (that's huge professional-size) are made by rotating the furnace with the molten glass and slowly cooling it down. The mirror blank then solidifies into a paraboloid. It still needs some grinding, but the process is many times cheaper than traditional methods.
Sooo jealous of the fact kids of today get to have this guy be a thing! The content he covers, as well as the simplistic yet somehow still extremely informative without being dumbed-down method in which he presents it, is all very captivating and attention-grabbing. Give this guy a catchy stage name and a show on PBS, he could easily be this generation's Bill Nye-Already is, if you ask me.
Another advantage is that any dust would go to the edge of the spinning mirror due to the radial force :)
The simplicity of explaining the complexity of scientific theories is what drives me towards this channel. Keeps the science kid in us alive even at my age. Thanks to the team at Action Lab.
I've never thought about the difference between lenses and mirrors before, but you're right. Light should reflect the same regardless of the wavelength, while different wavelengths refract differently.
This is super cool! I understand how it is simpler for this to be pointed straight up, but it would be really cool to see how it would look if you were able to put this in some ‘hypothetical’ centrifugal device, so that with a slow motion camera, and some clever stabilization, editing, it would be pretty cool to see if that could work.
Great video! Actually I knew about the parabolic shape of spinning fluids from my old text book in fluid dynamics, but that they in fact used this phenomenon in telescopes was amazing! Thanks for great video and explanation, keep up the good work! 🤓
I'm kind of curious if you could spin up your liquid telescope up to speed and get it to the right shape and then flash freeze it so you can then point it at other directions?
Your explanations are superb!!