Extremely Large Telescope - Deep Sky Videos

that gate there is the entrance to the European Southern Observatory at para now parallel to mountain that's it there and if i zoom in on top you'll see something you might recognize that's the VLT Very Large Telescope but that's not what we're looking at today today we're going to go to where they're going to be able to the extremely large telescope which is going to be even bigger than that and I can show you exactly where it's going to be it's going to be there several areas on s on that peak now I'm going to tell you more about it show you exactly where it's going to be but it's a 45 minute drive first so I'm going to get in the car and we're on the way talking about EE LT the European extremely large telescope no we actually talked about this before but what's different now is you've been there you've actually got to go and see the site you didn't know I would have loved to come but I was sick so sadly I was at home and you were getting to visit all these interesting places as with all things in astronomy bigger better more powerful telescopes it's big it's very big to really get an idea if there the chemistry and atmosphere of an exoplanet you really need something which is ideally ten times bigger than the largest ground-based telescopes we have right now it's going to be the largest telescope in the world what's better it's been a crazy drive so far if you look back this way you can just see there there's parallel in the VLT it's quite way way now but our destination well suddenly that's a whole lot closer there it is there's the summit we're about to drive to you can even see the sort of the track that leads to the top that were about to drive up which is going to be interesting here's the story it costs in round numbers it costs about a billion euros to build all there abouts and so we need a billion euros from somewhere and it turns out that into form money that's already been committed from different countries from money that ESO kind of has in the bank from its annual subscriptions and from savings on other things they've got about 600 million euros or there abouts they've identified when they get to 900 million euros or there abouts then they've got 90 percent of the costs it's a little more but then just let's stick with this round in round numbers then that's when you start building because obviously you don't really want to wait until you've got every last penny before you start building but equally you can't start building when you're not going to know you're going to have enough money to build it so there's still a gap at the moment the most likely thing to cover that gap is that Brazil is in the process of signing up as a member of ESO and it's signing up fee is essentially that extra 300 million euros so as and when Brazil signs on the dotted line they will actually have enough money to really start building the telescope okay everyone welcome to the summit of Cerro Armazones I'm aware I pronounced that differently every time we start off out here there is para now you can see the VLT Vista you can also see all the support buildings and accommodation that's where we've driven from we drove across basically all that desert you can see some road sometimes we were on good roads sometimes not such good road and we've made it up here to the summit so let's have a little look around first of all let's look at the view out over this side which is even more spectacular desert mountains and far in the distance there there's a mountain called you'll yeah yeah Co which is one of the ten highest mountains in the Andes and the highest ever archaeological remains were found there it's a bit of history but let's get back to where we are here on the summit there's a few few bits of infrastructure here there's Laura and Pete there's a little telescope there that's being used to monitor the seeing from up here so they look up the atmosphere atmospheric conditions how well you can see the night sky so they can have plenty of data about the seeing here long before they actually build the ELT more scientific monitoring over there and this tower here again that's scientific monitoring weather temperature wind things like that so they're building up a great big amount of data before they even get here really and the old marker for the summit so actually it's it's quite a privilege to be on the summit and there won't be many more people on this summit because when they come around to actually build the ELT they can actually blow the some it up in a way they have to flatten all this they're going to lower the mountain a bit make a nice big flat platform for the äôt like they did for the VLT at Paranal I guess back in the 98 late 1990s people started thinking about the next generation of telescopes and really going going up a scale and at that time ESO had an incredibly ambitious proposal to build a telescope which was going to be a hundred meters in diameter and actually had the best acronym of any telescope ever it was going to be called owl which stood for the overwhelmingly large telescope and so it would have been really spectacularly huge telescope and as with any of these processes the way it works is there's lots of design reviews and lots of people look at it and you get lots of feedback there are lots of stages along the way of saying well can we build this and those kinds of things and essentially it was considered with owl that it might have worked but when you're going to spend that kind of money on something might have worked isn't good enough you've really got to do all your risk reduction that says it's actually you know we really are very confident this really will work that we have all the technology to do that so without all the we just too many risks and so they basically stepped away from that and said okay so we can't do that let's look at something a little bit more modest in size and so that led to ELT at the time so we started 100 meters then the e-elt designed the original design was 42 metres in diameter I think the answer being 42 wasn't actually any coincidence at all that somebody had a bit of a sense of humor in the process and knew that the answer had to be 42 so they designed a 42 meter telescope and so that was designed that went through an entire design process it was essentially approved and then we went up against the costs it turned out the building a 42 meter telescope was just pushing the cost envelope a little bit too far it could almost certainly have been built but it was just too expensive and it turns out so the way this telescopes built is it's actually a whole series of one-and-a-half meter exact you know segments that all combine to form this this mirror single mirror and so it turns out there was a relatively easy D scope you could do which is just take away one ring of these one-and-a-half meter diameter hexagonal things so that takes you from 42 meters you lose three meters you lose one and a half meters off side each side so that goes from 42 to 39 meters and it turns out strangely it sounds like a very small change that small change saved a lot of money so it's it's due to start construction we sometime next year and it's going to take about ten years to get from that point to actual first light of course I'm happily filming away all the mountains here what really matters is up there I mean one of the real reasons this site was chosen was because of the excellent seeing conditions we're up here during the day of course night times when it counts but there's no way they'd let us drive up here at night that road was insane there are things we can do right now but the things we still just beyond our Ridge and if other things which are well beyond our reach and that's really why I think we've decided to go from rather than going from 8 meters to 16 meters to 32 meters we decided to kind of go to go big at this stage just so that we these things should allow us to do things really to keep to keep astronomy in terms of breakthroughs at the forefront really for the next 30 40 50 years the original phase of discussion where we're actually talking about the telescope sites were being looked at all over the world so the Canary Islands for example was one of the possible sites that people looked at where you might build the thing so people there were lots of sites were looked at and that the site actually relatively close to where the VLTs are turned out to be the best for all sorts of reasons partly because of the quality of the images you get there partly because actually to run a telescope this big you need quite a lot of infrastructure you need a lot of power up there just to turn the down dome around for example takes a lot of power you need water you need people on hand and so on and so actually you want to build it somewhere relatively remote but actually it's a real advantage to build it relatively close to existing infrastructure and existing observatory because then you haven't got huge amounts of infrastructure you need to build just to support the new telescope there are a couple of other little observatories around here there's one run by a local university here in Chile and that one down there is run by Germans cool little spot apparently there's usually someone there how'd you like to be working there alone middle of nowhere another interesting fact actually this mountain was almost chosen as the site for the VLT which ended up over there so you know it's pretty good for telescopes and finally it's going to get one when they be with the e-elt in astronomy always that the current generation of telescopes answers a bunch of questions but always asked a bunch more there's always these tantalizing things that you start to see and so my favorite I mean probably the as far as I'm concerned probably the single most exciting piece of science with the EE LT is at the moment we're just starting to see planets around other stars okay we can see that they're there but we don't know much about them with the kind of collecting area we'll have with the e-elt will actually be able to analyze the light that's being reflected from most planets going around other stars and start studying their atmospheres and actually even start looking for the molecules you only get in atmospheres where there's life things called biomarkers so perhaps you know the single most exciting piece of science I could envisage there with the e-elt is saying not only is there a planet around that star there but actually there's life on it I was told you very rarely see wildlife here but there you go there's a bird on top of the little telescope this is just a cool little spot that we've stopped halfway between para now and the EOT site so so you can see powering out there the alt site you can't see at the moment it's a powerful pass that Martian Ridge but a really cool Martian landscape here just worth a little look

Channel: DeepSkyVideos

Views: 182,669

Rating: 4.9141955 out of 5

Keywords: astronomy, astronomers, nebulae, deepsky, deepskyvideos, deep sky, telescope, European Southern Observatory (Organization), European Extremely Large Telescope (Telescope)

Id: 450jt8LlcnY

Length: 11min 12sec (672 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 19 2013