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This is Scientific American's 60-second science. I'm Christopher in Taliatta.

To study the heavens, it's all about the photons.

We in astronomy are always greedy. We want every photon that we can collect.

Drew Phillips, astronomer at the University of California Observatories. More photons, he says,

basically means more science about incredibly faint, distant objects.

And that's where the optics problem comes in, because incoming light reflects off several mirrors

before it comes out the business end of a telescope. And mirrors aren't perfectly reflective.

The traditional mirror coating, aluminum, reflects only about 90% of light.

Bounce that light around a few times in a telescope, and you lose valuable photons.

The throughput, the actual number of photons that are detected in the end in a modern spectrograph,

you're doing good if you get 30%.

So you want the most reflective material for your mirrors, like silver, which reflects 97 to 99% of visible and infrared light, respectively. Big improvement over aluminum. But silver's got its problems, too. It is finicky. It's subject to tarnish and oxidation and corrosion. So Phillips and his team have borrowed a trick from the computer industry called

atomic layer deposition. The technique allows them to take a silver-coated mirror and coat it with

extremely uniform layers of transparent aluminum oxide to protect against corrosion. And unlike

this small-scale atomic deposition used in the electronics industry, this new machine, recently

installed in a lab at UC Santa Cruz, is scaled up to coat mirror segments up to a meter in diameter,

meaning you could coat all 500 mirrors of a state-of-the-art telescope, like the planned 30-meter

...