The European Extremely Larger Telescope or E-ELT will be the largest optical and infrared telescope in the world. In early December 2014, ESO Council gave the green signal for the first construction phase of the telescope.
At present, astronomy has reached a point where much bigger telescopes are essential to address many of the important unanswered questions. Recently, scientists have gone a step further to construct world's largest telescope.
To make the construction memorable, a ceremony was held at ESO's Paranal Residencia in northern Chile. During the ceremony, researchers have announced that the future giant telescope will be on top of Cerro Armazones, a 3046-metre peak mountain.
The E-ELT will have a main mirror 39 meters across it. It will also collect 13 times more light than any other optical telescope. This main mirror will not be a single mirror. Instead, it will consist of 798 hexagonal mirror segments each about 1.4 meters but only five centimeters thick, Phys.Org reported.
According to researchers, this larger telescope has an unusual optic design using five mirrors. This also includes advanced adaptive optics feature that refines the haziness of astronomical images which is caused by atmospheric turbulence. Using this technique, the E-ELT telescope will be able to provide different color images up to 15 times sharper than the famous Hubble Telescope.
In addition, this spectrograph is actually designed by Oxford University scientists and they named it "HARMONI". However, the construction of this telescope will take itself about a decade and it will also tackle some of the biggest scientific challenges, in modern days.
Moreover, researchers are very optimistic about this larger telescope. Now, they are saying it will help to understand the formation and evolution of distant galaxies and study their atmosphere for biosignature. It will also help to better understand the nature of the mysterious dark matter and dark energy.
Astronomers are expecting an unexpected surprising result that cannot be anticipated today. The European Extremely Larger Telescope will represent the biggest eye on the sky and it will also revolutionize many areas of astronomy. The E-ELT is set for completion in 2024.
