A project expected to bring major changes to humanity's understanding of the universe, the Extremely Large Telescope with a main mirror nearly 40 meters across, is being assembled in Chile's Atacama Desert with first observations expected in 2028.
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00:00High on a hill in one of the world's driest places, a project that could shake up our
00:04understanding of the whole universe.
00:07Scientists have dubbed it the Extremely Large Telescope, or ELT for short.
00:13And box by box, its parts are arriving for assembly at a spot in Chile's Atacama Desert,
00:193,000 meters above sea level.
00:21Here, in a virtually cloudless environment, astronomers will be able to probe some deep
00:26mysteries, from how the first stars formed to whether there's life beyond Earth on so-called
00:32exoplanets.
00:33And in particular, we will be able to study if there are signs of life in the atmospheres
00:38of those worlds around other stars.
00:43The scale of the project is enormous.
00:46The Intergovernmental Research Organization behind it, the European Southern Observatory,
00:51is spending a billion and a half U.S. dollars on the facility.
00:55And they expect this will be money well spent.
00:57With a main mirror nearly 40 meters across, it should be unrivaled in terms of power for
01:03decades to come.
01:05It's come a long way since the contract was awarded in 2016.
01:09Estimates put the progress of construction at around 60 percent.
01:13One hundred fifty-two segment assemblies already fully processed and ready to be installed
01:18on the telescope now, and we did it in less than one year.
01:22I mean, this is a major challenge.
01:25The first observations aren't expected until 2028, but already the European Southern Observatory
01:31foresees it will overturn assumptions and bring vast new stores of knowledge.
01:36It even compares the project's importance to that of Galileo's telescope 400 years ago.
01:53The builders of the extremely large telescope are hoping for extremely large revelations
01:58to bloom from this arid corner of the planet as the stars give up their secrets.
02:04Andy Hsu and John Ventriast for Taiwan Plus.