Greenland Telescope
The Greenland Telescope is a radio telescope that is currently installed and operating at the Thule Air Base in north-western Greenland. It will later be deployed at the Summit Station research camp, located at the highest point of the Greenland ice sheet at an altitude of 3,210 meters (10,530 feet).
| Alternative names | GLT |
|---|---|
| Part of | Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory |
| Location(s) | Greenland. Currently located at the Thule Air Base but will be deployed at the Summit Station in the center of Greenland. |
| First light | 25 December 2017 |
| Telescope style | radio telescope |
| Diameter | 12 m (39 ft 4 in) |
| Website | www |
| Related media on Commons | |
The telescope is an international collaboration between:
- The Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (Taiwan) (project leaders)
- The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (United States)
- The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (United States)
- The Haystack Observatory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (United States)
In 2011 the U.S. National Science Foundation gave the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory a 12-meter radio antenna that had been used as a prototype for the ALMA project in Chile. The antenna was to be deployed in Greenland. Deploying the telescope in the middle of Greenland is ideal for detecting certain radio frequencies.
The telescope will be used to study the event horizons of black holes and to test how general relativity behaves in environments with extreme gravity.
The Greenland Telescope will become part of the global network of telescopes that makes up the Event Horizon Telescope that will study supermassive black holes and explore the origin of the relativistic jet in the active galaxy Messier 87.