Uppsala University Develops Powerful Instrument for Extremely Large Telescope
The European Southern Observatories (ESO) is an international organization with 16 member countries (including Sweden) that operate several of the world’s most powerful telescopes, all located in Chile. ESO’s next big project is to build the world’s largest telescope, the ELT, which will have a mirror size of an incredible 39 meters. Construction of the telescope at Cerro Amazones in the Atacama Desert, Chile, is well underway and is expected to be ready for observations in 2028.
ANDES is a powerful spectrograph, an instrument that splits light into many small wavelength ranges. The instrument will have an extremely high precision for the wavelength division in infrared and visible light. ANDES will be used to make detailed maps of Earth-like exoplanets and thus make it possible to search for life outside our solar system.
The universe’s first stars
It will also be able to be used to analyze the chemical composition of celestial bodies very far away, meaning it could become the first instrument to characterize the first stars that formed in the universe. In addition, the instrument can be used to measure whether the basic physical constants vary with time or position in the universe. ANDES has been designed and will be built by an international consortium consisting of research institutions from 13 countries. The project is led by Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) and Sweden participates through SELTIC.
The agreement was signed at ESO headquarters in Garching, Germany, on 5 June by ESO Director General Xavier Barcons and Roberto Ragazzoni, President of INAF.
– ANDES is an instrument with enormous potential for groundbreaking scientific discoveries, and will influence how we perceive the universe,” says Alessandro Marconi, Principal Investigator for ANDES.
Designed at Uppsala University
The Swedish involvement in ANDES (and other future ELT instruments) is organized in SELTIC, which is led by Göran Östlin (Stockholm University), Nikolai Piskunov (Uppsala University), and Sofia Feltzing (Lund University), and is funded by the Swedish Research Council. Much of the Swedish work with ANDES is carried out at Uppsala University, which has participated in the design of the instrument, specifically testing and developing the fiber optics that lead the light from the telescope to ANDES. The research team will also develop software to analyze the complex data that the instrument collects.
– In addition to the main goals of ANDES, my research group will use the instrument to study older stars in the Milky Way and try to understand how and when they were formed, a so-called stellar archaeologist, adds Nikolai Piskunov.