World's Largest (and Least-Creatively Named) Telescope Approved for Construction
The European Extremely Large Telescope will narrowly beat out Hawaii's Thirty Meter Telescope once it's completed.
The European Extremely Large Telescope, seen here in an artist's rendering, will be the largest of its kind once it's completed in 2024.
The European Southern Observatory has given the construction green light to what will be the biggest – and least-creatively named – telescope in the history of astronomy, snubbing what would have been the world’s largest telescope currently under construction in Hawaii.
The European Extremely Large Telescope is expected to be completed on the top of a mountain in Chile’s Atacama Desert by 2024 and cost almost $1.4 billion, according to NBC News.
Its light-collecting lens will be 128 feet wide, about four times larger than any telescope already in use, according to Vox. This will also be about 30 feet wider than the equally unimpressively named Thirty Meter Telescope Observatory once that's completed in Hawaii in 2018, according to USA Today.
The Thirty Meter Telescope’s outer lens will be, unsurprisingly, 30 meters – or 98 feet – wide. The largest telescopes currently in use are also in Hawaii, at the top of Mauna Kea. But these stargazers are about three times smaller than the massive telescopes currently under construction in Hawaii and Chile, according to USA Today.
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The European Extremely Large Telescope project was first proposed back in 2006 by the group of more than a dozen countries in Europe and South America that make up the ESO. Funding was approved in 2012, pending the collection of 90 percent of the project’s total cost before construction could begin.
That benchmark of more than $1 billion was met in October, when Poland agreed to join the ESO, according to NBC News. Construction is now set to begin on the massive stargazer, though groundwork on its foundation actually began this summer.
An exception to the 90 percent-funding rule allowed the ESO in June to blow away nearly a million tons of rock atop Cerro Armazones, an almost 10,000-foot-high formation in the Chilean Andes Mountains, according to the Guardian. Though the mountain is now shorter by about 130 feet, it will still provide the Extremely Large Telescope with an ideal location to stargaze.
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The tops of mountain peaks in isolated regions are viewed as prime real estate for telescopes that function best with minimal light pollution and relatively close proximity to the sky. Higher altitudes can in some cases bypass cloud coverage, making stargazing less weather-dependent.
The Cerro Armazones mountain that will support the Extremely Large Telescope actually made the Thirty Meter Telescope’s location short-list before Hawaii was chosen as its place of construction, according to USA Today.
If all goes according to plan, Hawaii will still be able to claim the title of the world’s largest functioning telescope upon its scheduled completion in 2018. But the Extremely Large Telescope will make that designation short-lived.
