Dennis Overbye, a science writer and reporter, recently posted a fascinating article on the telescopes of Las Campanas Observatory located on a plateau high in the Chilean Andes in the Atacama desert. It is one of the driest and darkest places in the world and thus an ideal place for building very large telescopes with which to peer into the depths of the cosmos. How large? Some of the telescopes located at Las Campanas are the Very Large Telescope, composed of four telescopes, each more than eight meters (27 feet) in diameter. It was built by an international collaboration called the European Southern Observatory. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, another eight-meter telescope, is set to start operating next year, mapping the entire sky every three days. Vera Rubin was the first astronomer to postulate the existence of “dark matter.” Continue reading →