Canadian Universities Join Consortium to Build Telescope in Chile

Seven Canadian universities have joined a Caltech and Cornell University-led consortium to build CCAT, a proposed 25-meter aperture telescope. The telescope-which will occupy a site 18,400 feet above sea level on Cerro Chajnantor, a mountain in Chile's Atacama desert-will become the world's largest, most precise, and highest astronomical facility of its kind, and will give astronomers a new window into star and galaxy formation.

Taking advantage of fast-developing detector technology in the submillimeter-wavelength electromagnetic domain, CCAT will act as a surveyor of cosmic structures. Its extremely wide field of view also will enable large-scale surveys of the sky, complementing the international Atacama Large Millimeter Array now under construction on the plateau below CCAT's site.

The Canadian contingent-which includes the University of Waterloo, the University of British Columbia, University of Toronto, McGill University, the University of Western Ontario, McMaster University, and the University of Calgary-joins Caltech, Cornell and their partners, the University of Colorado at Boulder, Germany's University of Cologne and University of Bonn, and Associated Universities Inc. of Washington, D.C.