On a mountaintop in Chile sits one of the world’s most powerful optical telescopes: ESO's Very Large Telescope, or VLT for short. newscientist's abbybeall took a behind-the-scenes look with newscientistdiscoverytours Learn more:
The mountaintop of Cerro Paranal in the Atacama desert was blasted away to create a level site for the Very Large TelescopeANTU, Kueyen, Melipal, Yepun. These four hulking figures dominate the summit of Cerro Paranal, a rust-red mountain in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Their home is among the most inhospitable places on Earth – a desolate, dusty terrain reminiscent of the surface of Mars.
As night falls, the giants slowly rotate and stir into life. Doors slide open, and within the structures vast mirrors begin to capture light from distant corners of the universe. Together they make up the world’s most powerful optical telescope: theYou might have seen some of the VLT’s spectacular snapshots of swirling nebulae and far-away galaxies. But it was not built just to take pretty pictures.
This corner of Chile is an astronomer’s paradise. The sky is cloudless for 330 days of the year, there is almost no light pollution and the air contains barely any moisture that would otherwise block certain wavelengths of light. “When the moon is down, the night sky is absolutely amazing,” says …
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