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ATACAMA DESERT, Chile, November 1 (Reuters) – In Chile’s dry Atacama Desert, astronomers scan the clear night sky for the existence of life on other planets and study the so-called ” dark energy, “a mysterious cosmic force believed to be accelerating the expansion of the universe.
At the heart of the race is the Giant Magellanic Telescope (GMT), a $ 1.8 billion complex being built at the Las Campanas Observatory that will have a resolution 10 times that of the Hubble Space Telescope. to the exploration of distant worlds.
The telescope, which is expected to enter service by the end of the decade, will compete with the extremely large telescope of the European Southern Observatory – located further north in the same desert – as well as with the thirty-meter telescope (TMT) under construction in Hawaii.
“This new generation of giant telescopes is aimed precisely at detecting life on other planets and determining the origin of dark energy,” said Leopoldo Infante, director of the Las Campanas observatory.
“It’s a race of these three groups for who makes the first and who makes the first discovery.”
People look at the sky during a visit to the ‘Las Campanas’ observatory, located in the Andes mountain range, in the Atacama Desert region, near Vallenar, Chile on October 14, 2021. REUTERS / Pablo Sanhueza
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Infante said the new giant telescope would be able to detect organic molecules in the atmosphere of distant planets.
“It’s the wait,” he said. “And whoever detects life on another planet will win the Nobel Prize, I assure you.”
The other prize studies dark energy – distinct from the equally enigmatic dark matter – which is considered a property of space and which is at the origin of the accelerated expansion of the universe. It represents a large part of the universe, but mostly remains an unsolved mystery.
“There is an energy which causes the expansion of the universe, but also the acceleration of this expansion,” said Infante, adding that scientists knew that this energy had to exist, even if they did not understand it. the origin.
“So this telescope is designed to be able to study precisely what is called the dark energy of the universe, to be able to physically understand what that energy is and where that energy comes from.”
Reporting by Jorge Vega and Fabian Cambero; Editing by Adam Jourdan and Richard Chang
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