Scientists are building the biggest telescope of its kind to try and find the “architecture of the universe”.
The new MOTHRA telescope hopes to reveal the “cosmic web”, which huge network of gas and dark matter that connects galaxies across the cosmos. It aims to do so by using a specific kind of telescope – the largest all-lens one ever built – along with special filters that hope to see the faint light of hydrogen gas.
The work is being funded by Alex Gerko, the founder and chief executive of XTX Markets. He is one of the UK’s richest people and the country’s biggest taxpayer.
Pieter van Dokkum, an professor of astronomy and physics at Yale University and co-founder of the project, told the Financial Times that he had received an email from the billionaire that came “out of the blue” to discuss the project. He had played a practical role in building it, Professor van Dokkum said.
“Breakthrough instruments developed at speed often require new approaches —organisationally and technically,” said Mr Gerko. “I’m proud to support such an ambitious project focused on generating long-term scientific value, and to help pioneer a model designed to drive meaningful research progress on hard, foundational astronomical challenges.”
MOTHRA is made up of 1,140 high-end Canon telephoto lenses. When they are strung together, they can work as a single huge telescope, its creators said.
It is a development of the Dragonfly Telephoto Array concept, which has shown that it could be used to find very faint, large structures that were previously unfound with conventional telescopes. But it is a “dramatic upscaling” of that concept, the researchers behind it said.
The “cosmic web” is made up of a vast network of structures that were present in the earliest moments after the Big Bang, and have grown with the universe. The telescope hopes to spot the faint glowing light that comes from intergalactic gas that has been trapped in that web, helping to show where the spokes of the web can be found.
“MOTHRA is a telescope designed around a single idea: maximize discovery space for the dim glow of intergalactic gas,” said Professor van Dokkum in a statement. “The combination of a huge effective aperture, wide field, and tunable ultra-narrowband filtering opens a new observational regime.”
The telescope is being built in Chile. It started work in 2025 and should be switched on by the end of the year.
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