RISE OF THE SUPER TELESCOPE

As work continues on its design and construction, we take you inside the Extremely Large Telescope as it prepares for first light

- Dominic Reseigh-Lincoln

Looking further and deeper than ever before… that’s the central goal that’s driven astronomy since its inception. Studying the night sky and the universe that frames our world in ever-increasing detail, dissecting the light that’s reaching our little world and discerning the grand legacy of the cosmos. For centuries humans have been building more and more powerful terrestrial telescopes that can see further into the void of space, each one expanding in size and breadth of vision.

That ever-increasing scale and desire to know more has brought us to the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). A global initiative centralised by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) Council, the ELT project aims to construct the largest optical to near-infrared Earth-based telescope ever created with the intention of studying the furthest reaches of the universe, for the first time studying the properties and physics of the first galaxies and the behaviours of distant planets that orbit other stars.

The genesis of the project took place back in 2000, when European astronomers and scientists began discussing the desire to see the furthest reaches of the universe in more detail. Some of the largest telescopes in operation at the time, such as the Gran Telescopio Canarias – based in the Canary Islands – or the Very Large Telescope (VLT) – based in Chile just 20 kilometres (12.4 miles) from the future ELT site – were capable of identifying these far-flung points in space, but were too primitive to study them in depth.