“Gigantic” is the only word that aptly describes what is currently being built in the Chilean Atacama Desert. This evening, Dr. Dietmar Hager takes us to the Deep Space 8K for the ELT, the Extremely Large Telescope. What diverse possibilities will it offer science in the future?
Tickets: regular 13 €, reduced 11 €
Registration recommended at center@ars.electronica.art or +43.732.7272.0
Language: German
The ESO, the European Southern Observatory, is building a gigantic telescope in the driest desert on Earth, the ELT – Extremely Large Telescope. The mirror that is currently being built for this telescope is also gigantic: at over 39 m in diameter, it will be by far the largest mirror ever developed and built for a telescope. It will consist of 798 hexagonal segments, each of which is about five centimeters thick and 1.5 meters wide, and together they will be able to collect 10,000,000 times more light than the human eye.
The last segment was recently cast by the SCHOTT company and is now being polished in France to an accuracy of 10 nanometers. This means that the surface irregularities of the mirror are less than a thousandth of the width of a human hair.
This evening, we visit the construction site in the Atacama Desert, where the dome for this telescope is almost complete, with Dr. Dietmar Hager. We take a look at the many possibilities this gigantic telescope will offer astronomers and what they hope to achieve for science before we set off again on a journey to the most distant stars.