The 50-metre LMT will begin taking science data in 2008 (Image: Large Millimeter Telescope Project)
The new 50-metre Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT) in Mexico is set to begin a two-year testing period on Wednesday. It will use radio waves to look into the dawn of the universe.
“This telescope is capable of observing conditions prevalent when the first stars and galaxies were formed 13.4 billion years ago,” says LMT project manager Emanuel Mendez, an astrophysicist at Mexico’s National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics (INAOE).
The 2000-tonne telescope cost $115 million and took eight years to build. It will be used to study the composition of comets, the atmospheres of planets beyond our solar system and the origins of the universe.
Advertisement
“Microwave astronomy is still in its infancy and promises to unveil fascinating secrets,” Mendez says. “Short millimeter wavelengths will give us precise measurements of speed, temperature, density, magnetic field and physical composition of our targets.”
The steel-and-cement structure will be officially inaugurated on Wednesday, after which the telescope will be put through rigorous testing before it is deemed fully operational in 2008.
It is perched at an altitude of 4600 metres on the cold, spent Sierra Negra volcano located 350 kilometres (217 miles) southeast of Mexico City. The site offers near-optimal observing conditions: very low humidity and a vantage point giving it an excellent view of both southern and northern skies.
“Microwaves crave water vapour, so if we want to see faint, distant objects, it’s imperative the surrounding atmosphere be as dry as possible,” Mendez says.
The only problem the LMT has to contend with are the very high winds buffeting the mountain. “It was designed to withstand wind speeds of up to 200 kilometres (124 miles) per hour,” he says.
INAOE and the University of Massachusetts in the US will share the annual cost of running the LMT, which is estimated at $4.5 million.
![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)