New high-powered telescope reaches Chilean peak
The Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope is now ready to be assembled at its destination in the Atacama Desert. Planned to take up operations in April 2026, it will be able to look all the way back to the Big Bang, revealing new details about star and galaxy formation.
After a six-week ocean voyage, a week spent outside Chile’s Port of Angamos waiting to offload and another week trekking through the mountains, the first major component of the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (FYST) has arrived at its final home: the Cerro Chajnantor mountaintop, more than 5.600 metres above sea level.
The disassembled telescope was offloaded and trucked approximately 450 kilometres to the base of Cerro Chajnantor, in Chile’s Parque Astronómico Atacama. From there, the parts are making a careful ascent 5.600 metres to the summit, where the telescope will be reassembled to eventually begin its work studying the universe, with first light projected for April 2026.
“It is wonderful that FYST has arrived safely in Chile,” says Eiichiro Komatsu, director at the Max Planck Institute of Astrophysics, which is part of the German Consortium of the CCAT Collaboration. “FYST is a high-tech telescope and an example of how advanced technology can enable us to study a wide range of scientific topics, from the physics of gas in the Milky Way to the physics of the Big Bang. I can't wait to work on the data that will come from FYST next year.”
FYST will be the most powerful telescope in the world for its mapping speed and sensitivity at its wavelength. It will detail star and galaxy formation from the earliest days of ‘cosmic dawn’, through ‘cosmic noon’, when most of today’s stars were formed, providing insight on cosmic inflation and gravitational waves from the very first moments of the Big Bang. It will also track the flows of gas, dust and magnetic fields across the interstellar ecosystem within galaxies.
FYST is a project of CCAT Observatory, Inc., which consists of a Cornell-led collaboration, a German consortium including the University of Cologne, the University of Bonn and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, and a Canadian consortium of universities led by the University of Waterloo. The telescope was built and first assembled in Germany, designed by CPI Vertex Antennentechnik in Duisburg and tested in Xanten on the Wessel GmbH premises.
