Original URL: https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2024/12/northwestern-joins-giant-magellan-telescopes-international-consortium/
By Amanda Morris (Northwestern University, December 13, 2024
Northwestern University officially is a founding partner of the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), an enormous ground-based telescope currently under construction in Chile’s Atacama Desert.
Launching in the 2030s, GMT will be the world’s most powerful optical telescope. By producing images 10 times clearer than the Hubble Space Telescope, GMT will explore the distant universe, including the search for signs of life outside Earth’s solar system.
As a partner, Northwestern will contribute its expertise in astrophysics, artificial intelligence (AI) and engineering. Specifically, Northwestern researchers will develop and apply AI tools to enhance GMT’s abilities to search for Earth-like planets across the Milky Way, probe the universe’s most energetic explosions and explore the relationship between galaxies and black holes.
Northwestern already leads the world-renowned Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) and the newly established National Science Foundation (NSF)-Simons Foundation AI Institute for the Sky (SkAI, pronounced “sky”). The new GMT partnership will further expand opportunities for faculty and students across Northwestern. To read more, see https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2024/12/northwestern-joins-giant-magellan-telescopes-international-consortium/
The SkAI Institute is one of the National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and Simons Foundation.
Information on National AI Institutes is available at aiinstitutes.org.
