The US National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and the state of Bavaria will build a radio telescope on top of Germany’s highest mountain.
Their Wetterstein Millimetre Telescope will go up on the Zugspitze, a 2,962m-high peak in southern Germany.
NRAO said it would improve the antenna’s sensitivity and resolution across the millimetre wavelength range, allowing for “groundbreaking astronomical observations”.
The project is being funded by the Bavarian government, and will be supervised by the University of Würzbburg.
Thorsten Glauber, Bavaria’s environment minister, said the facility would begin a ”new chapter in space research”, and would help to “consolidate Bavaria’s place in the premier league of research”.
The telescope would also be a step towards establishing an “ngVLA” – a next generation very large array. This is a set of separate telescopes that work together as a single unit, and whose power increases the further apart its component parts are.
The ngVLA is aiming to fill a gap in certain wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, between the sub-2mm range of the ALMA telescope in Chile’s Atacama desert and the 10cm and above wavelengths that will be observed by the future SKA Observatory, under construction in South Africa and Australia (see further reading).
Eric Murphy, a scientist with NRAO, commented: “The WMT will be an exciting research facility and further opens up the possibility of one day establishing a global ngVLA network. Its placement on the Zugspitze provides unparalleled observing conditions, which can enhance the overall sensitivity and resolution of the ngVLA. This may enable astronomers to conduct unprecedented research across a wide range of astrophysical topics.”
Up to 16 similar telescopes may eventually be built to form the array, with completion envisaged in the 2030s.
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