Coinciding with the celebration of its 50th anniversary, theEuropean Southern Observatory (ESO)has launched theconstruction of the world’s largest optical / infrared telescope. TheEuropean Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) will be a segmented mirror telescope of39.3 meters in diameter, located in Cerro Armazones (Chile), and will begin scientific operations at the beginning of the next decade. According to its promoters, it will cover an area of the sky about one-tenth the size of the full Moon. It will be four to five times larger than current state-of-the-art facilities of this type, andwill gather about 15 times more light.
The part that will take the longest to design and build will be the complexadaptive mirror M4, which will be about 2.5 meters in diameter, but only 2 millimeters thick, which will allow it to be deformed as if it were a flexible sheet. M4 will take care ofcorrect both the effects of atmospheric turbulence and wind turbulenceon the structure of the telescope. Once installed, this extraordinary deformable mirror will allow the E-ELT to reach the theoretical maximum in terms of resolution.
Thus, and E-ELT will become“the largest eye in the world to look at the sky”and it will address some of the greatest scientific challenges of our time, including tracking Earth-like planets around other stars in the “habitable zones” where life could exist. It will also conduct “stellar archeology” in nearby galaxies. It will also be used to investigate the nature of dark matter and dark energy.
ESO is Europe’s leading intergovernmental astronomical organization and the most productive astronomical observatory in the world. Fifteen countries support this institution: Germany, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, Spain, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Sweden and Switzerland. ESO is the European partner of another revolutionary telescope, ALMA, the most ambitious astronomical project in development.
