If you drove on the winding road up the Chilean Andes, you’d spot the white specks of distant telescopes peppering the hills. Sometime by the end of this decade, one of those specks will tower above the rest, visible even miles away.
Up close, it resembles a rotating luxury apartment complex. Vents taller than a garage door let in air or shut out desert dust. Though the enclosure stands 22 stories tall, it houses no humans. Instead, when the building splits open each night, you’ll see seven of the largest mirrors in the world. Reflected in them is the entire sky – and universe – come alive.
This is the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), slated to be one of Earth’s most efficient and powerful telescopes upon completion.
What Is the Giant Magellan Telescope?
The Giant Magellan Telescope sprang from an idea in the early 2000s, that science needed to go even bigger, according to John Mulchaey, director of the Carnegie Observatories – including the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, the telescope’s future home.
