Question: what kind of teliscope do you use?

David Sobral answered on 19 Mar 2020:

I use quite a lot of different telescopes and you can see some of my favourite ones here in a short video about my research: https://youtu.be/K9I469U_W5s

Most of the telescopes that I use are on the ground, in places like Hawaii, Chile or the Canary Islands. They have diameters of up to 10.4m, so they are HUGE. These include the Keck and GTC telescopes, but also Subaru and the VLT. These are optical and (near-)infrared telescopes, and I use them to scan the sky to discover new galaxies, but also to study galaxies in details. For example, by combining many telescopes we can measure how many stars a galaxy has, how many new stars it is forming, what chemical elements are in the galaxy, how much gas and dust and even how much dark matter! It’s just exciting what you can learn from galaxies billions of light years away!

Apart from the more “normal” (but huge!) telescopes on the ground, I also use X-ray and ultra-violet telescopes that are in space. That’s because our planet’s atmosphere protects us from such “dangerous” light, so for us to see the Universe in X-ray and ultra-violet we need to have telescopes above the atmosphere.

I also use telescopes that look like giant antennas, like ALMA in Chile. They allow us to study the coldest parts of galaxies, but also to see how dusty galaxies are.

So overall, I use all kinds of telescopes, and that is really necessary. No single telescope can work very well on its own, but, together, we can learn sooo much about the Universe and its almost 2 trillion galaxies!