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Astronomical Telescope Construction Project is Scheduled in Chile for Summer

Posted on: Saturday, 18 December 2004, 00:00 CST

Dec. 17--PASADENA -- Learning more about black holes, planets orbiting other stars and the formation of the universe are among the lofty goals astronomers have set for an enormous telescope that will be built in northern Chile by the Carnegie Observatories and its partners. This week, the Observatories and the University of Arizona announced they will cast the first 27.5-foot-diameter section of the Giant Magellan Telescope's primary mirror next summer.

Once complete, the primary mirror will be 83 feet in diameter and will provide more than four times the collecting area of any currently operating optical telescope. It will have 10 times better resolution than even the famed Hubble Space Telescope.

The Carnegie Observatories' new baby is one in a series of extremely large ground-based telescopes currently being designed to extend the realm of observable space from Earth. Also falling within that series is the Thirty-Meter Telescope that Caltech and the University of California are designing. Scientists hope to use such telescopes to gain new insights into the birth, evolution and properties of the universe.

The Giant Magellan Telescope will join four smaller telescopes at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile where light pollution from cities is minimal and observing conditions are ideal.

The observatory, about 50 miles north of the coastal Chilean city of La Serena, became the Carnegie Observatories' home for observation in the 1980s. Prior to that, Carnegie astronomers had worked from the observatories at Mount Wilson and Palomar Mountain. George Ellery Hale of Mount Wilson Observatory fame founded the Carnegie Observatories in 1904 with support from the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

"The type of science that we do here at the Carnegie Observatories requires the very darkest skies and good images, and unfortunately in the Los Angeles basin the level of background light has grown to the point where we are no longer able to do our science," said Matt Johns, the associate director of the O bservatories and project manager for the Giant Magellan Telescope.

He said the team hopes to have the telescope fully functioning by 2016 and added that, once operating, it will allow astronomers to study objects much farther away from Earth and therefore further back in time to earlier epochs in the history of the universe.

The new telescope will build on the technology developed for, and successfully utilized by, a pair of 6.5-meter Magellan telescopes at Las Campanas. In a written statement, Wendy Freedman, the director of the Carnegie Observatories, said the duo "has far exceeded our expectations. The Magellan telescopes have proven to be the best natural imaging telescopes on the ground."

Eight institutions are in the Giant Magellan Telescope consortium, including the Carnegie Observatories, Harvard University, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, University of Arizona, University of Michigan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University.

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Source: San Gabriel Valley Tribune

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