There are three “extremely large telescopes” under development internationally. There are very good scientific reasons for these ambitious developments, but they are challenging engineering projects, and very costly. For decades there have been debates about the relative merits of telescopes of different sizes, with no clear consensus on the balance between investments at various scales. This talk will examine one area of research which is advancing very rapidly, exoplanet research, to explore this issue. The field is too new to offer any firm conclusions, but there are very interesting questions to discuss.

 

Charles Alcock is the Director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (the “CfA”). His research concerns the determination the composition of cosmic dark matter, and innovative surveys of the outer solar system. Alcock was educated at the University of Auckland, New Zealand and at the California Institute of Technology. He has previously been a long-term member of the Institute for Advanced Study (1978-1980), an Associate Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1981-1986), a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (1987-2000), and a Professor of Astronomy and Physics at the University of Pennsylvania (2001-2004).  He assumed his position as Director of the CfA in 2004, and in addition was the Acting Undersecretary for Science at the Smithsonian Institution from April 2008 until August 2009. Professor Alcock received the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ernest O. Lawrence Award for Physics in 1996 and the Beatrice M. Tinsley Award of the American Astronomical Society in 2000.  He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2001 and to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2006.