In our endeavour to explore and understand as much of space as possible, humans have made great progress in bringing heavenly bodies closer to Earth without actually going there. Chief among these efforts has been the development of the humble telescope, which has gone from a tube that uses lenses to enlarge distant objects, to great big antennae that receive radio waves from space.

The largest one ever has recently been greenlit for construction in Chile. It’s called the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), and it will be completed in two phases. At a cost of about a billion euros for the first phase, the European Southern Observatory projects that the telescope will be operational by 2024.

“The decision taken by Council (the ESO’s governing body) means that the telescope can now be built, and that major industrial construction work for the E-ELT is now funded and can proceed according to plan. There is already a lot of progress in Chile on the summit of Armazones and the next few years will be very exciting,” said Tim de Zeeuw, European Southern Observatory director general in a statement.

“The funds that are now committed will allow the construction of a fully working E-ELT that will be the most powerful of all the extremely large telescope projects currently planned, with superior light collecting area and instrumentation. It will allow the initial characterisation of Earth-mass exoplanets, the study of the resolved stellar populations in nearby galaxies as well as ultra-sensitive observations of the deep Universe,” concludes de Zeeuw.

[Source – ESO]