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Q2e RW5 U03 VideoTranscript

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Q2e RW5 U03 VideoTranscript

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Steven Lee
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Q2e Reading & Writing 5: Unit 3 Video Transcript

The Very Large Telescope Transcript


Hart-Davis: I'm at Paranal in Chile, home to the world's largest optical telescope1. And here
it is! Surprisingly, it's called The Very Large Telescope. This is 2,600 meters
above sea level, which means that the air's a bit thin and I'm a bit breathless,
but it's the driest place on earth, which makes it the very best place in the
world from which to look at the universe.

Traveling up through the inhospitable2 Atacama Desert to The Very Large


Telescope, or VLT, I realized what an extreme and ambitious project this is. It
cost 300 million pounds to build the VLT out here at Paranal. They must have
been expecting to see something pretty amazing. These images from the VLT
are the finest pictures of the cosmos3 you can get from anywhere on earth.
Amazing views of exploded stars, close-ups of the planets of our solar system,
and mysterious dark clouds of dust. One huge first for the VLT is this, just a
couple of blobs but it's the first direct view of a planet orbiting4 a sun outside
our solar system. This place is about stretching what we can know about the
most distant reaches of the universe. It's something we've been trying to do for
years. The ancient astronomers looked for patterns in the stars, constellations5
that, although they cross the sky, seemed to stay the same shape. And then
they looked for patterns in time, because the constellations would come back
after a period, and that was a year, and so they felt they were tuning in with
the universe.

Using just their eyes, astronomers worked out an amazing amount about how
the universe worked, including the laws by which the planets go round the sun.
But, to discover what the universe is needed something else, a way of seeing
more than you can with the naked eye.

And that first happened in 1608. The telescope made a fantastic difference to
astronomy.

It didn't just make things bigger and closer, it allowed us to see things that had
been invisible before. So the Milky Way, instead of just a smear in the sky,
became separate stars. And then there were planets, and they had moons. And

1
optical telescope: a telescope you can look through with your eyes
2
inhospitable: difficult to stay or live in, especially because there is no shelter from the weather
3
cosmos: the universe
4
orbit: to move in a curved path around a much larger object, especially a planet or star
5
constellation: a group of stars that forms a shape in the sky and has a name

©Oxford University Press. Permission granted to reproduce for classroom use.


Q2e Reading & Writing 5: Unit 3 Video Transcript

then there were strange clouds of glowing dust, and curious structures that
turned out to be galaxies.

Almost as soon as telescopes were invented, a race began to see further, to see
fainter objects, to see them in more spectacular detail. It was also a race to
build the world's largest telescope. A race that has ended up here at the VLT.

When they said it was very large, I hadn't appreciated just how big. THE VLT is
actually four huge telescopes, plus four smaller ones. Each of the four main
telescopes weighs 400 tons. At one time, it was thought four meters was as big
as you could make a mirror, but thanks to new technology, at 8.2 meters, these
are the biggest single piece mirrors in the world. The bigger the mirror, the
smaller the thing it can see. A big mirror also gathers more light, letting you see
very faint6 objects at the edge of the universe, like the most distant galaxy
every recorded, discovered by the VLT in 2004.

6
faint: cannot be clearly seen

©Oxford University Press. Permission granted to reproduce for classroom use.

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