Desert Skies

With its clear clear skies and bone dehydrated air, the Atacama Desert in northern Chile has long drawn astronomers. Some of the many absolute telescopes in the world are housed here.

But now, work is about to start on a telescope that will dwarf them all - not a VLT (Very Large Telescope) but an ELT (Extremely Large Telescope).

It will be built 2,600m (8.530ft) up in the Andes on a site unaware the Paranal observatory, and when it is ended in 10 years' time it will be the many absolute visual instrument in the world.

The telescope will be the size of a football stadium, cost around $1.5bn (930m) and import over 5,000 tonnes.

It will be built to ward off leading earthquakes, a serious care in Chile.

Astronomers say the images it produces will be 15 times crook than the sent to earth by the Hubble space telescope, and might finally help us find signs of life on other planets.

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) , that operates Paranal, says the telescope, and others similar to it, "may finally change our notice of the world as ample as Galileo's telescope did".

The telescope's principal counterpart will be 42m wide. That is 5 times bigger than the mirrors on the existing telescopes at Paranal, that are already amid the greatest in the world.

Because it is unfit to make such a large, curved, high-precision mirror, engineers in Europe will make scarcely 1,000 tiny hexagonal mirrors that will be shipped to Chile and propitious together similar to pieces in a hulk jigsaw puzzle.

Henri Boffin, a comparison astronomer at Paranal, says the new telescope should help scientists residence questions lifted by the existing instruments at the observatory.

"What you have been able to do so far is elevate a set of questions," Mr Boffin said. "Like, for example, you have detected that the enlargement of the world is accelerating, but you have no hint why.

"There's a type of dim appetite you regard is there, but you have no hint at all what it is. Similarly, you know that the world is done in segment of dim matter, but you have definitely no hint what it is, and it creates up more than 25% of the universe.

"The new telescope will hopefully help us answer these questions."

The building of the telescope is not the usually leading celestial plan in Chile.

Just up the thoroughfare from Paranal, engineers are completing the building of ALMA, the world's greatest network of air wave telescopes.

It consists of more than 60 hulk air wave dishes, fabricated on the Chajnantor mountainous country at a dizzying rgreat heights of 5,000m.

Tim de Zeeuw, the head of ESO, says ALMA, that is scheduled to start operations after that this year, promises to be "as transformational for scholarship as the Hubble space telescope".

These two projects are cementing Chile's repute as an astronomer's paradise. By a few calculations, by 2025 the country will be home to more than half the image-capturing ability in the world.

Much of the reason for that lies in the dried skies, that are amid the clearest on earth. In a few tools of the Atacama Desert, rainfall has never been recorded.

Altitude is moreover important, quite for ALMA. Radio telescopes collect up wavelengths from externa; space, but the signals are frequently misrepresented by H2O fog in the earth's atmosphere.

By building at altitude, in dehydrated air, engineers can obtain on top of a few of that moisture.

But there are other reasons because astronomers are flocking to Chile.

Being in the southern hemisphere, its observatories are not in send contest with the in the United States and Europe, that stare out at not similar skies.

"If you wish to do modern astronomy and you wish to do it in the southern hemisphere, you have to do in Chile," Mr Boffin says.

Politics and infrastructure are moreover factors. Chile has emerged as one of the many stable, moneyed countries in the zone given its lapse to democracy in 1990. That fortitude is necessary for long-term investment projects similar to these.

The existing telescopes at Paranal have already helped scientists make a few noteworthy discoveries.

For example, they prisoner the initial ever images of a planet outward our own solar system, and helped astronomers work out the age of the oldest well known star in the Milky Way - it is 13.2bn years old.

One of the observatory's greatest feats was proof that a outrageous black hole lies at the centre of the Milky Way.

Scientists compute that this puzzling canceled has a pile 3 million times incomparable than the Sun.

The astronomers at Paranal are unapproachable of these achievements but say they right away wish more.

And they say their hulk new telescope will help them accomplish it, receiving our bargain of the world to the next level.