AUSTIN, Texas – The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) is a next-generation optical/infrared telescope being developed in northern Chile that will make important discoveries on subjects such as galaxies in the early Universe and Earth-sized planets orbiting nearby stars.
The University of Texas at Austin is investing another $45 million in the GMT, the world’s most powerful telescope. This additional funding brings the university’s total commitment to $110.3 million.
The GMT organization is an international consortium and new investments from its partners now total $205 million to accelerate construction. In addition to UT Austin’s recent contribution, it includes commitments from the Carnegie Institution for Science, Harvard University, the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), the University of Arizona, and the University of Chicago.
“I am pleased that six like-minded partners of the Giant Magellan Telescope have worked together to make an impressive new financial commitment to build the telescope and its instrumentation, and bring the telescope closer to first light,” said Taft Armandoff, director of McDonald University Observatory and Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors of the GMT organization. “GMT will provide transformative observation opportunities for our faculty, students and researchers.”
The funds will be used to manufacture the 12-story telescope structure at Ingersoll Machine Tools in Illinois, to continue advances on the telescope’s seven primary mirrors at the Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab in Arizona, and to build one of the most advanced scientific instruments, dubbed by UT Austin GMT Near Infrared Spectrograph (GMTNIRS).
“We are honored to receive this investment in our future,” said GMT President Robert Shelton. “The funding is truly a joint effort by our founders. It will lead to the manufacture of the world’s largest mirrors, the giant telescope mount that holds and aligns them, and a scientific instrument that will allow us to study the chemical evolution of stars and planets like never before.”
The funding comes after the National Academy of Sciences Astro2020 Decadal Survey evaluated the Giant Magellan Telescope as a core partner of the United States Extremely Large Telescope Program. Astro2020 ranked the program a top priority and said it was “absolutely essential if the United States is to maintain a leadership position in ground-based astronomy.”
GMT is under construction at Carnegie’s Las Campanas Observatory in Chile and will allow astronomers to look further into space in more detail than any optical telescope before. It will have ten times the light-gathering area and four times the spatial resolution of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and will be up to 200 times more powerful than existing research telescopes.
This unprecedented angular resolution, combined with revolutionary spectrographs and high-contrast cameras, will work in direct synergy with JWST to enable new scientific discoveries. GMT will be the next step in studying the physics and chemistry of the faintest light sources in space that JWST will identify. This includes scouring the atmospheres of potentially habitable planets for life, studying the first galaxies to form in the universe, and finding clues that unlock the mysteries of dark matter, dark energy, black holes, and the formation of the universe unravel.
“We work with some of the brightest engineers and scientists at the world’s leading research institutions,” said Walter Massey, GMT chairman and former director of the National Science Foundation and chairman of Bank of America. “The recent contributions of our investment partners to the Giant Magellan Telescope collectively push the frontiers of astronomy, make the future a reality, and allow us to answer several important scientific goals, including ‘Are we alone in the universe?'”
The telescope has already made considerable construction progress in recent years. Six out of seven primary mirror segments were cast in Tucson, Arizona. The third primary mirror segment has completed its two-year polishing phase and is undergoing final testing. Construction of a 40,000 square foot facility in Rockford, Illinois to manufacture the telescoping structure has been completed. Production of the telescope’s first adaptive secondary mirror is well underway in France and Italy, and the site in Chile is being prepared for the next phase of construction and foundation pouring.
This latest $205 million investment round positions the Giant Magellan Telescope as one of the first of a new generation of extremely large telescopes to be built. First light is expected by the end of the decade.