Seriously HUGE Scientific Instruments

FAST radio telescope, China

Its official name is the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST). But that acronym doesn’t do it justice. FAST is big. Ridiculously big. Its monster dish measures 500 meters (1,640 feet) across.

It’s huge. FAST’s now holds the record for the world’s largest single-aperture telescope. Its dish stretches 500 meters across. Imagine about 30 soccer fields stitched together. FAST obliterates the previous record holder, the Arecibo Observatory. Arecibo’s dish stretches just 305 meters across and held the record for this type of telescope since the 1960s. You’ll recognize Arecibo if you’ve ever seen the movie Contact.

FAST hunts for life, gravitational waves and pulsars. Yep, FAST will be the lookout for E.T. FAST’s potential to discover an alien civilization will be five to ten times that of current equipment, as it can see farther and darker planets.

FAST sits in radio silence. Don’t plan on watching Netflix near this telescope. Radio telescopes don’t work well if there’s any interference nearby. That’s why there is a “radio silence” area around FAST.

The Extremely Large Telescope, Chile

Since 2005 ESO has been working with its community and industry to develop an extremely large optical/infrared telescope.

Dubbed ELT for Extremely Large Telescope, this revolutionary new ground-based telescope concept will have a 39-metre main mirror and will be the largest optical/near-infrared telescope in the world: “the world’s biggest eye on the sky”.

The ELT programme was approved in 2012 and green light for construction was given at the end of 2014. The first stone ceremony for the telescope was attended by the President of Chile in May 2017.

The ELT will tackle the biggest scientific challenges of our time, and aim for a number of notable firsts, including tracking down Earth-like planets around other stars in the "habitable zones" where life could exist — one of the Holy Grails of modern observational astronomy.

Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment, China

Why is there more matter than antimatter in the Universe? To better understand this facet of basic physics, energy departments in China and the USA led in the creation of the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment.

Located under thick rock about 50 kilometers northeast of Hong Kong, China, eight Daya Bay detectors monitor antineutrinos emitted by six nearby nuclear reactors. Featured here, a camera looks along one of the Daya Bay detectors, imaging photon sensors that pick up faint light emitted by antineutrinos interacting with fluids in the detector.

Early results indicate an unexpectedly high rate of one type of antineutrino changing into another, a rate which, if confirmed, could imply the existence of a previously undetected type of neutrino as well as impact humanity's comprehension of fundamental particle reactions that occurred within the first few seconds of the Big Bang.

The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, Canada

The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) was a neutrino observatory located 2100 m underground in Vale's Creighton Mine in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada.

The detector was designed to detect solar neutrinos through their interactions with a large tank of heavy water.

Z Pulsed Power Facility,

The Z machine, or the Z Pulsed Power Facility, is the largest X-ray generator in the world, designed to test materials in extreme conditions. It is located in Albuquerque, N.M., at Sandia National Laboratories. The electromagnetic pulse causes impressive lightning when the machine is discharged.

Joint European Torus (JET) vessel, England

Inside the JET vessel, the largest tokamak in the world, which investigates the potential of fusion power at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, Oxford, England.

The National Ignition Facility (NIF), USA

NIF is a large laser-based inertial confinement fusion (ICF) research device, located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California. NIF uses lasers to heat and compress a small amount of hydrogen fuel with the goal of inducing nuclear fusion reactions. NIF's mission is to achieve fusion ignition with high energy gain, and to support nuclear weapon maintenance and design by studying the behavior of matter under the conditions found within nuclear weapons.[1] NIF is the largest and most energetic ICF device built to date, and the largest laser in the world.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or "Webb")

JWST is a space telescope that will be the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. The JWST will provide greatly improved resolution and sensitivity over the Hubble, and will enable a broad range of investigations across the fields of astronomy and cosmology.

One of its major goals is observing some of the most distant events and objects in the universe, such as the formation of the first galaxies. These types of targets are beyond the reach of current ground- and space-based instruments. Other goals include understanding the formation of stars and planets, and direct imaging of exoplanets and novas.

The JWST's primary mirror—the Optical Telescope Element—is composed of 18 hexagonal mirror segments made of gold-coated beryllium. These combine to create a 6.5-meter (21 ft 4 in) diameter mirror that is much larger than the Hubble's 2.4-meter (7 ft 10 in) mirror.

Unlike the Hubble, which observes in the near ultraviolet, visible, and near infrared (0.1 to 1 μm) spectra, the JWST will observe in a lower frequency range from long-wavelength visible light through mid-infrared (0.6 to 27 μm). This will allow the JWST to observe high redshift objects that are too old and too distant for the Hubble and other earlier instruments to observe.

Large Hadron Collider (LHC), Switzerland

LHC is the world's largest and most powerful particle collider and the largest machine in the world.[1] It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundreds of universities and laboratories, as well as more than 100 countries. It lies in a tunnel 27 kilometres (17 mi) in circumference and as deep as 175 metres (574 ft) beneath the France–Switzerland border near Geneva.

The collider has four crossing points, around which are positioned seven detectors, each designed for certain kinds of research. The LHC primarily collides proton beams, but it can also use beams of heavy ions: Lead–lead collisions and proton-lead collisions are typically done for one month per year.

The aim of the LHC's detectors is to allow physicists to test the predictions of different theories of particle physics, including measuring the properties of the Higgs boson and searching for the large family of new particles predicted by supersymmetric theories, as well as other unsolved questions of physics.

Physicists hope that the Large Hadron Collider will help answer some of the fundamental open questions in physics, concerning the basic laws governing the interactions and forces among the elementary objects, the deep structure of space and time, and in particular the interrelation between quantum mechanics and general relativity.

Stu needs to see this thread....