Gift to Fund World’s Largest Telescope

The University of California and two other institutions will receive $200 million in funding from a Bay Area foundation to develop and construct what will be the world’s largest telescope.

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, a private organization founded by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, has made a $200 million financial commitment over a period of nine years to the Thirty Meter Telescope project.

The telescope, which is now in its developmental stage, involves the collaboration of an international research team with participation from all the campuses in the UC system, the California Institute of Technology and the Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy.

“We are very excited about the project and the opportunities it provides,” said UC spokesperson Chris Harrington.

The telescope is designed to be the largest optical infrared telescope in the world, with nine times more area for observation and data gathering than the Keck Telescopes, which are currently the largest, said Jerry Nelson, project participant and professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz.

The telescope’s adaptive optics system, which measures disturbances in the atmosphere and corrects for the interference from light waves, will also enable the capture of high-resolution images.

Jerry Nelson said the telescope, which is slated to be fully operational in 2016, will be used for many research purposes, including searching for planets around nearby stars and investigating the birth of stars and galaxies.

Foundation spokesperson Greg Nelson said the organization is committed to the development of the telescope because it will help answer significant questions in cosmology.

“Our interest in the project is its

application of a new technology that will help to ... answer the basic questions of universe,” he said.

Gary Sanders, project manager and a visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology, said the telescope’s design and development are divided among the participating institutions depending on each institution’s specialty.

“It’s an equal partnership ... (in which) each part of the project is divided among the groups,” he said.

Sanders said UC Berkeley is responsible for designing an instrument used to search for planets outside the solar system because the campus’s astronomy department has developed similar instruments in the past.

The telescope has the potential to make surprising discoveries and address open-ended questions about the universe, said James Graham, professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley and member of the project team.

“Although the telescope is built (to search) for specific answers, such as the nature of the supernova, the things we cannot predict will be the ones that will ultimately be remembered,” he said.

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