Why Do Telescopes Shoot LASERS Into Space?

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In videos of some of the world's largest telescopes, we often see them firing enormous lasers into the sky? Why do they do this? It's all part of creating artificial stars, so the telescope can use adaptive optics to reduce the impact the the turbulent atmosphere has on images. Adaptive optics involves deforming the telescope mirros thousands of times a second to undo the blurriness that Earth's atmosphere causes in images. To do this effectively, we need a very bright guide star in the patch of sky you want to observe. Not all patches have bright enough stars, so sometimes we have to make our own with these huge lasers being shot into space.

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