Artist rendering of the Giant Magellan Telescope
Astronomers have begun to blast 3 million cubic feet of rock from a mountaintop in the Chilean Andes to make room for the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), the world’s largest telescope when completed near the end of the decade. The GMT will help astronomers probe the nature of dark matter and dark energy – mysterious forms of matter and energy that allow galaxies to form while the expansion of the Universe accelerates…