£355m telescope launched to hunt for black holes

A gamma ray telescope has been blasted into space to probe the most energetic form of light.

The £355million Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope known as GLAST was launched into orbit from Cape Canaveral on Wednesday.

The telescope is expected to push the boundaries of the known universe.

It will be exploring the 'almost inconceivable amounts of energy' produced outside our planet by studying gamma rays.

These rays are millions to hundreds of billions of times more powerful that what can be seen with the unaided eye.

The radiation is produced by the most violent phenomena in the universe, such as the gravitational clamps of black holes and the magnetic fields of star cores so dense with matter that a tablespoon would weigh a billion tons.

"Every time you do something an order of magnitude better than you've done before, you always wind up with new discoveries," said John Morse, director of NASA's astrophysics division.

GLAST picks up work left unfinished by the pioneering Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, which operated from 1991 to 2000 in orbit.

Astronomers from NASA are teaming up with institutions in France, Germany, Japan, Italy and Sweden.

They hope to find answers to conundrums such as the origins of dark matter and even explain the early evolution of the universe.

Among the telescope's other targets are:

• Supermassive black holes, which are believed to reside in most galaxies. These objects emit no light but generate jets of highly energized gas and particles that are blown completely out of the host galaxies.
• Gamma ray bursts, which can radiate more energy in seconds than our sun will during its entire 10 billion year lifetime. An instrument on the Compton Telescope found 271 gamma ray bursts. The origin of 171 of them remains unknown.
• The speed of light, which may or may not be uniform in a vacuum. Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity states that electromagnetic radiation should travel at the same speed no matter how short or long its wavelengths, but this has not been proved.

GLAST has a wide field of view and will scan every three hours. It was designed to last five years, but scientists are hoping it will last twice as long.