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The importance of telescopes in the scientific world Some people will have never used a telescope; most will have tried one once or twice to get a closer view of the sky. However, what few appreciate is the scientific power of the telescope which goes galaxies (both metaphorically and literally) beyond the beautiful view of a starlit nightscape. It was in the early 17th century that this machine was discovered by a Dutch eyeglass maker Hans Lippershey who named this device a “looker”. Galileo,
one of the greatest physicists of all time, increased the magnification of this contraption to examine extraterrestrial bodies. It was from this development and many more advancements in technology over the subsequent years that the idea of the modern day telescope (now defined as ‘a device used to form
magnified images of distant objects’) came about. So many of today’s most important physics concepts have been proven by using a telescope. Possibly the most prominent of these was the use of a telescope in order to age the universe. The most famous telescope named the Hubble telescope was named after an astronomer Edwin Hubble and was constructed in 1993. This particular telescope played a significant role in helping astronomers calculate the distance since the Big Bang by measuring the brightness a special type of star called a Cepheid variable and then calculating the distance of 56 million light years which then helped them work out the rate of the expansion of the universe and subsequently how old it was. This discovery was huge as it changed the prediction of how old the earth was from a huge range of 10-20 billion years to a much more specific 13.8 billion years and this number was
