Location chosen for European Extremely Large Telescope (42 metres wide!)

[muriel_volestrangler]

The observatory will be constructed on Cerro Armazones, a 3,000m-high mountain in Chile's Atacama Desert.

The E-ELT (European Extremely Large Telescope) will have a primary mirror 42m in diameter - about five times the width of today's best telescopes.

Astronomers say the next-generation observatory will be so powerful it will be able to image directly rocky planets beyond our Solar System.

It should also be able to provide major insights into the nature of black holes, galaxy formation, the mysterious "dark matter" that pervades the Universe, and the even more mysterious "dark energy" which appears to be pushing the cosmos apart at an accelerating rate.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8645511.stm

It seems about 4 times the width of today's largest, but nevertheless, that's a monster. Images 15 time sharper than the Hubble.

[Liberal Veteran]

1. Chile gets all the good stuff. Damned light polution.

I assume that is one of their reasons for placing it in such a remote area. I very much miss good dark skies at night.

[Posteritatis]

3. The desert and altitude help, too

It doesn't rain in the Atacama - there's parts that haven't seen precipitation throughout recorded history - and the altitude means there's less atmosphere to peer through.

[BrklynLiberal]

2. Wow!

Hard to imagine even better pics than we get from Hubble!!


An example of what we are already getting from that location.

Go to site and see BIG picture...

http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1017/

<snip>
VISTA, the latest addition to ESO’s Paranal Observatory in the Chilean Atacama Desert, is the world’s largest survey telescope (eso0949). It works at infrared wavelengths, seeing right through much of the dust that is such a beautiful but distracting aspect of the nebula, and revealing objects hidden from the sight of visible light telescopes. Visible light tends to be scattered and absorbed by interstellar dust, but the dust is nearly transparent to infrared light.

VISTA has a main mirror that is 4.1 metres across and it is equipped with the largest infrared camera on any telescope. It shares the spectacular viewing conditions with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), which is located on the nearby summit. With this powerful instrument at their command, astronomers were keen to see the birth pains of the big young stars in the Cat’s Paw Nebula, some nearly ten times the mass of the Sun. The view in the infrared is strikingly different from that in visible light. With the dust obscuring the view far less, they can learn much more about how these stars form and develop in their first few million years of life. VISTA’s very wide field of view allows the whole star-forming region to be imaged in one shot with much greater clarity than ever before.

The VISTA image is filled with countless stars of our Milky Way galaxy overlaid with spectacular tendrils of dark dust that are seen here fully for the first time. The dust is sufficiently thick in places to block even the near-infrared radiation to which VISTA’s camera is sensitive. In many of the dusty areas, such as those close to the centre of the picture, features that appear orange are apparent — evidence of otherwise hidden active young stars and their accompanying jets. Further out though, slightly older stars are laid bare to VISTA’s vision, revealing the processes taking them from their first nuclear fusion along the unsteady path of the first few million years of their lives.

<snip.

[Turbineguy]

4. 42

Now I wonder just how they arrived at that.

[Ichingcarpenter]

5. Who knows

But I forgot what the question was....LOL