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ASTRONOMERS GO TO EXTREMES IN THINKING BIG

A big universe needs a bigger telescope, astronomers have decided. But as they look at the vastness of space, back home they may be rubbing low on words for big.

There is already something called the Very Large Telescope, but this has been judged too small for a European consortium which wants to search for Earth-like planets. The new £700 million project is for a more powerful successor, with a mirror 100 metres in diameter It will be known as the Extremely Large Telescope.

When completed in ten years, it will capture images of the universe in unprecedented detail, giving scientists their first shot at finding and studying distant planets as small as the Earth. These are the most likely sites for extraterrestrial life but they are too faint to be identified by present technology. John Davies of the UK Astronomy Technology Centre (UKATC) in Edinburgh, who is involved in the project, said: “We should be able not only to see Earth-like planets around nearby stars, but to say look, here it is and it’s green.”

The ELT scheme will be announced next Friday at a meeting at the Royal Astronomic Society in London. The mirror will be constructed with thousands of hexagonal glass tiles and will use more glass than all the telescopes in the history of astronomy put together, according to Adrian Russell, director of the UKATC.

The most likely sites are the Canary Islands and Chile. The scheme, which brings together two rival teams from 13 countries, has yet to secure funding, but astronomers are confident of raising the money from the European Union and individual governments.

THE TIMES, Dec. 7, 2002