University of Chicago receives reflector for next generation telescope

CHICAGO - An important part of a first-of-its-kind telescope arrived at the University of Chicago Friday.

The next-generation telescope will eventually be installed in the South Pole and is designed to map the afterglow in the sky that remains from the Big Bang.

Scientists have been working on it for years. On Friday afternoon, the first piece arrived on campus – an enormous reflector made in Germany that was brought to the United States by ship.

It was created out of two 20-ton blocks of aluminum. When it’s all said and done, the telescope will be comprised of three of those reflectors.

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Now that it's been delivered, the reflector must be precisely mapped with a laser to see if the shape is exactly what is needed.

"No one else has built a mirror quite like this out of this big piece of aluminum, so we really want to make sure it works as deigned," said John Carlstrom, University of Chicago Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics. "What it allows us to do is look at the light coming to us right now actually, from the early universe so we’re looking back in time 14 billion years and seeing that light just reaching us and we want to actually measure that, the patterns of the light on the sky, and from that we are trying to unravel the mysteries of how the universe actually started."

The new telescope is expected to be completed in the early 2030s.

Then, it is going to the South Pole to peer into the sky.