Human eyeballs aren’t the best detectors of faint and distant astronomical objects. That’s why we made telescopes, which use lenses or mirrors to gather and focus light, revealing the details of faraway planets, stars and galaxies.
A bevy of cutting-edge telescopes is poised to capture the universe’s photons using mirrors up to 10 million times as large as a person’s pupil. Our knowledge of planetary, stellar and galactic systems will likely be rewritten by these telescopes, which will have exquisite resolution and a variety of instruments to record light at different wavelengths. To get a sense of what will be in store, let’s compare some of these upcoming scopes — and their diameters — with a few of their revolutionary forebears.
Galileo’s Telescope (0.037 meters)
