“The better astronomical observations of the real thing can be, the more accurately we can reproduce what we see with our experiments on Earth,” Riko Senoo, a graduate student at the University of Tokyo and a TAO researcher, said in the statement. “I hope the next generation of astronomers use TAO and other ground-based and space–based telescopes to make unexpected discoveries that challenge our current understanding and explain the unexplained,” added Masahiro Konishi, a research associate at the University of Tokyo.
Before the newly opened telescope was built, Yoshii and his colleagues also assembled and operated a 1-meter telescope on the mountaintop in 2009. Dubbed miniTAO, the tiny telescope imaged the center of the Milky Way, our home galaxy. Two years later, miniTAO received the Guinness World Record for the highest astronomical observatory on Earth.
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