LISA Gravity Wave Telescope

Laser prototype for space-based gravitational wave detector

Exactly how powerful this telescope will be remains to be seen, but it should theoretically be able to penetrate even the quark soup that inhabited the early universe for the first 100,000 years, taking pictures of the early big bang itself. The best design for such a telescope I know of, is a five satellite system somewhere past jupiter, but that's for future generations to play with. This one will take pictures no other telescope can of the early universe including quasars, giant black holes, you name it.

NASA has put this one on the fast track for development, knowing all too well it could easily lead to a theory of everything and an entirely new perspective on the universe. The lasers they have just tested are, no doubt, rather expensive and they could have quite likely saved money on them, by merely waiting another ten years at most to design the telescope, but they know the world needs answers yesterday, or our tomorrows are numbered.

In contrast the existing LEGO observatory is a toy telescope, just a little more powerful than it needs to be to detect gravity waves, which is why it took so long to detect them, because nobody had the laser technology. The US is the only country in the world anywhere near capable of constructing such a telescope. Perfecting such a telescope could easily require another fifty years or more of improvements in optics. Although people tend to think we know a lot about light, in recent years we've discovered so many new fundamental things about light and all the information it can convey that its obvious we have a long way to go yet. Even LISA is very likely only the equivalent of Galileo looking through his first optical telescope at the moons of Jupiter, and future telescopes could possibly peer into the voids between galaxies and as far back as a few milliseconds of the initial big bang.

Our universe is essentially translucent, with matter making up a fraction of it, and gravity waves can penetrate the furthest. Nobody has a clue what the pictures will look like, because LIGO might as well be an oscilloscope for all the resolution it provides.