British Search for Brown Dwarfs

In the heart of Oxfordshire, plans are being readied to ship the final and most crucial parts of another telescope, an all-British project, to the rocky, high-altitude desert in northern Chile.

The arrival of the four metres-wide main mirror, precision-polished at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot, and the world's largest infrared digital camera next month will herald the start of the delicate assembly phase of the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (Vista).

Vista is a £36m British-designed and funded project involving 18 universities that will survey the southern skies when completed next year. Its 64 megapixel camera will provide high-quality images which will identify objects invisible to optical telescopes, such as brown dwarfs - low mass objects barely able to produce any light - or faraway objects formed at the beginning of the universe.

"The biggest discoveries are the ones we haven't yet thought of," said Jim Emerson, an astronomer at Queen Mary, London and the principal investigator of the Vista collaboration.

Operating in the infrared will also allow Vista to see through the huge clouds of dust that block visible light in large parts of the galaxy. It is usually in here that new stars are born. The telescope will also look for the farthest galaxies and provide clues on how galaxies form.