THE VERY, VERY EXTREMELY LARGE TELESCOPE It’s big. In fact it’s so big the only name the European Southern Observatory (ESO) could come up was the obvious – the ‘European Extremely Large Telescop (E-ELT). Construction has begun in Chile on the project with the first stone laid recently. The image shows its dome open and its record setting 42-metre primary mirror pointed to the sky. The E-ELT dome will be similar in size to a sports stadium, with a diameter at its base of over 100 metres and a height of over 80 metres. The E-ELT will help track down earth-like planets around other stars in the ‘habitable zones’ where life could exist — one of the Holy Grails of modern observational astronomy. The structure will weigh over 5,000 tons with a moving mass of 3,000 tons The E-ELT will also make fundamental contributions to cosmology by measuring the properties of the first stars and galaxies and probing the nature of dark matter and dark energy. www.engineeringnews.co.nz 19
EN-July2017-eMag6
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