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WASHINGTON — A telescope arms race is taking shape around the world. Astronomers are drawing up plans for the biggest, most powerful instruments ever constructed, capable of peering far deeper into the universe — and further back in time — than ever before.

The building boom, which is expected to play out over the next decade and cost billions of dollars, is being driven by technological advances that afford unprecedented clarity and magnification. Some scientists say it will be much like switching from regular TV to high-definition.

In fact, the super-sized telescopes will yield even finer pictures than the Hubble Space Telescope, which was put in orbit in 1990 and was long considered superior because its view was freed from the distorting effects of Earth's atmosphere. But now, land-based telescopes can correct for such distortion.

Just the names of many of the proposed observatories suggest an arms race: the Giant Magellan Telescope, the Thirty Meter Telescope and the European Extremely Large Telescope, which was downsized from the OverWhelmingly Large Telescope. Add to those three big ground observatories a new super eye in the sky, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2013.

With these proposed giant telescopes, astronomers hope to get the first pictures of planets outside our solar system, watch stars and planets being born, and catch a glimpse of what was happening near the birth of the universe.

When scientists look at a faraway celestial object, they are seeing it as it existed millions and millions of years ago, because it takes so long for light from the object to reach Earth.

Current telescopes are able to look back only about 1 billion years in time. But the new telescopes will be so powerful that they should be able to gaze back to a couple of hundred million years after the Big Bang, which scientists believe happened 13.7 billion years ago. That's where all the action is.

Two new technologies enable this extraordinary quest — one reliant on modern lasers and computing power and the other inspired by ancient Greek and Roman tile work.

The first is adaptive optics. It allows telescopes on the ground to get rid of the distortion caused when looking through Earth's atmosphere into space.

Adaptive optics relies on a laser to create an artificial star, or a constellation of fake stars, in the sky. Astronomers then examine the fake stars and use computers to calculate how much atmospheric distortion there is at any given time. Then they adjust the mirrors to compensate like a pair of eyeglasses. This adjustment happens automatically hundreds of times per second.

The second breakthrough involves technology that makes bigger mirrors possible. Instead of casting a giant mirror in one piece, which is difficult and limits size, astronomers now make smaller mirror segments and piece them together.

Jerry Nelson, a scientist at Keck Observatory in Hawaii now working on the Thirty Meter Telescope, pioneered this technique and said he got the idea from looking at how the Greeks and Romans tiled their baths. This technique is going from 36 segments in current telescopes to 492 segments with his new project.

For the past decade and a half, the Keck has had the largest Earth-bound telescopes, with mirrors nearly 33 feet in diameter. Observatories to be built within the decade will dwarf those:

● The Giant Magellan Telescope. A partnership of six U.S. universities, an Australian college, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Carnegie Institution of Washington will place the telescope in Las Campanas, Chile, around 2016. The plan is for an 80-foot mirror. The cost is around $500 million.

● The Thirty Meter Telescope. The California Institute of Technology, the University of California and the Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy are aiming for a telescope with about a 98-foot mirror by 2018. The cost is about $780 million.

● The European Extremely Large Telescope. A partnership of European countries already has telescopes in Chile and is aiming for a new one with a mirror of 138 feet, scaled back from initial plans of 328 feet. The Europeans are aiming for a 2018 completion but have not chosen a specific location yet. The cost would be $1.17 billion.