Lots of scope

The University of Colorado at Boulder has signed an initial partnership agreement to participate in the design and construction of a 25-metre, far-infrared telescope that will be located in the Chilean desert to probe the distant galaxies, stellar nurseries and outer reaches of the solar system.

CU-Boulder and the United Kingdom Astronomy Technology Centre, based at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, Scotland, will collaborate with the two major partners, Cornell University and the California Institute of Technology, on the $100 million project, slated for completion in 2013.

The telescope will be built in the Atacama Desert in Chile at an altitude of about 18,000 feet and will be the largest, most precise and highest astronomical facility of its kind in the world, said Associate Professor Jason Glenn of the astrophysical and planetary sciences department who is spearheading the CU-Boulder portion of the project.

The Cornell Caltech Atacama Telescope, or CCAT, will gather radiation from sub-millimetre wavelengths, which are longer than visible and infrared light but shorter than radio waves, said Glenn. 'This facility will enable us to study the earliest stages of star and galaxy formation, as well as the initial conditions of the solar systems like our own,' he said.