The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has announced that its main governing body, the Council, has approved the organization’s planned construction project in Chile, meaning that humans will have access to the appropriately named “European Extremely Large Telescope” by 2024, according to Mashable.
“The decision taken by Council 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,” said Tim de Zeeuw, the ESO’s Director General, on its official website. “There is already a lot of progress in Chile on the summit of Armazones and the next few years will be very exciting.”
The ESO, a 15-nation intergovernmental research organization that includes most of western Europe, will build the telescope on top of a mountain called Cerro Armazones, in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, according to The Verge. Once construction is finished, the Cerro Armazones mountain will sport a 39-meter aperture optical and infrared telescope.
“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,” said de Zeeuw, as quoted by Space. “It will allow the initial characterization of Earth-mass exoplanets, the study of the resolved stellar populations in nearby galaxies as well as ultra-sensitive observations of the deep universe.”
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