Construction of Very Large Telescope

The Very Large Telescope is an astronomical observatory run by the European Southern Observatory on Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, one of the driest and clearest places on Earth. It consists of four main telescopes, each with a mirror of 8.2 metres, together with four smaller movable telescopes that can be combined to work as an interferometer, giving much sharper images. The first of the telescopes saw first light in the late 1990s. The Very Large Telescope took the first direct image of an exoplanet and tracked stars orbiting the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, work that contributed to the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics.

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