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                                                                                       TELESCOPE

                                                               There is a moment after you move your eye away

                                                               when you forget where you are

                                                               because you’ve been living, it seems,

                                                               somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.

                                                               You’ve stopped being here in the world.

                                                               You’re in a different place,

                                                                a place where human life has no meaning.

                                                               You’re not a creature in a body.

                                                               You exist as the stars exist,

                                                               participating in their stillness, their immensity.

                                                               Then you’re in the world again.

                                                               At night, on a cold hill,

                                                               taking the telescope apart.

                                                               You realize afterward

                                                                not that the image is false

                                                                but the relation is false.

                                                                You see again how far away

                                                                each thing is from every other thing.                                    

                                                                                                                        -Louise Glück

Charles Telesco’s research emphasizes the determination of the detailed structure of circumstellar disks around fairly young stars, those less than a few tens of millions of years old. Disks around stars younger than a million years old are likely still coalescing into planets, and determination of the disk structure provides constraints on the planet-forming environment, particularly the densities and temperatures of the coalescing solids and the shape of the disk. After a few million years or so, much of the primordial disk material, that is, that material left over from the original cloud that formed the star and disk, is used up or blown away, and the disk is converted to a so-called debris disk made of dust created from the collisions of the larger bodies—either large dust particles of planetesimals—that were formed during the earlier phase of the disk evolution. Determination of the disk structure at this phase tells us about those collisional processes, which are still important in the disk evolution. The tools that Charles Telesco uses for this research are mid-infrared cameras many of which he and his team at the University of Florida have built.  Mid-infrared radiation is emitted by starlight-heated solid particles (“dust”) in the central few hundred astronomical units of circumstellar disks. Those are the regions where planets form, and so mid-infrared imaging, spectroscopy, and polarimetry of these regions using 8 and 10 meter telescopes allows us to probe the structure of those planet-forming regions. Dr. Telesco’s research on circumstellar, protoplanetary disks has included the discovery with OSCIR in 1998 of the disk around HR 4796 A and, more recently, the first imaging, with T-ReCS, around Beta Pictoris, of what may be a catastrophic collision of two planets or asteroids in a young disk.

The first mid-infrared camera that he and his team developed shortly after he arrived at the University of Florida in 1995 was called OSCIR. With OSCIR, he established what has become a leading IR-instrumentation program. OSCIR was commissioned at the IRTF in late 1995, and was used extensively until 2001 at the IRTF, the CTIO 4-meter telescope, the Keck-2 telescope, and both Gemini North and South. In addition to being a front-line science tool, OSCIR played a unique role in providing critical engineering support during the commissioning of the Gemini telescopes. The success of OSCIR led to the successful competition by UF, with Telesco as PI, to build T-ReCS, a highly innovative IR imager and spectrograph that is now a facility instrument at the Gemini South telescope in Chile. Subsequently, Telesco and his team competed for, and received, the contract to build the first thermal-IR imager and spectrograph to be used on the 10-meter Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), the world’s largest optical telescope, nearing completion on La Palma, Canary Islands, Spain. That instrument, CanariCam, is completed: it will be deployed to the GTC in mid-2008 in time for first science operations in late 2008 or early 2009.