When completed around 2030, its vast, cyclopean mirror, measuring 39 metres across, will gather 100 million times more light than the human eye.<\/p>\n
The ELT is an impressive device, but it will take more than 15 years to realize it at a cost of over $2-billion. That\u2019s why one team of astronomers has embarked on another path. Their aim is not to reproduce the ELT but explore the universe in different way. <\/p>\n
At El Sauce Observatory, a site 500 kilometres to the south of the ELT, they are building a telescope so utterly novel in design that it barely seems like it\u2019s performing the same function. <\/p>\n
Yet, if successful, this new instrument will reveal the cosmos in a way never thought possible. <\/p>\n
Meet the Massive Optical Telephoto Hyperspectral Robotic Array, otherwise known as MOTHRA. <\/p>\n
Officially unveiled on Wednesday, the project is partly inspired by a giant moth-like creature from Japanese monster movie fame. And like its cinematic namesake, MOTHRA has compound eyes. Instead of an enormous mirror, it utilizes 1,140 telephoto lenses, identical to those used by professional photographers. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt sprang from a sincere desire to do science in a faster and better way,\u201d said Roberto Abraham, a University of Toronto astronomer and co-founder of the project.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat is going to emerge from this thing is mind-paralyzingly cool,\u201d he said in an interview.<\/p>\n
Only some of Mothra\u2019s compound eyes have been built so far in Chile, whose dark skies make it an ideal spot for the array. At full size, the array would have 1,140 lenses over 30 mounts.<\/p>\n
Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n MOTHRA’s namesake, a fixture of Japanese monster films, has compound eyes in her larval and adult forms. Both appear on this poster for 1996’s Rebirth of Mothra.Supplied<\/p>\n MOTHRA has the equivalent light-gathering power of a single telescope 4.7 metres across, but its off-the-shelf optics makes it less costly. The data captured by all those lenses can be combined into a single image by using computer techniques that were designed to steady the shaky pictures we take with our smartphones.<\/p>\n As an astronomical tool, its unique characteristics mean that it is uniquely suited to spotting very faint and diffuse objects in the night sky. <\/p>\n Scientists behind the project say they are after nothing less than the \u201ccosmic web.\u201d The term describes how gravity is thought to have shaped the contents of the universe after the Big Bang. <\/p>\n While matter would have started off evenly distributed, theory suggests that over time, slight fluctuations grew into a web-like pattern of filaments, with galaxies forming at their intersections.<\/p>\n Today, only the galaxies are visible. MOTHRA aims to change that by perceiving the much fainter glow of atoms that trace the outlines of the web.<\/p>\n \u201cThe computer simulations tell us that there\u2019s all this gas that connects the galaxies in the universe together,\u201d said Pieter van Dokkum, MOTHRA co-founder and astronomer at Yale University. \u201cThe imprint of that connectivity is still there today.\u201d <\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n Roberto Abraham and Pieter van Dokkum, left, laid the groundwork for MOTHRA with a project called Dragonfly, which set up this array in New Mexico.Courtesy of Dragonfly Team<\/p>\n The project is daring, but it\u2019s grounded in experience. It began over a beer 15 years ago, when Dr. Abraham and Dr. van Dokkum were bemoaning the financial and technical barriers that slow the pace of big astronomical facilities. <\/p>\n They were determined to try something new, possibly by leveraging the growing capabilities of commercial optics. <\/p>\n Starting in 2012, they decided to test the idea of using camera lenses mounted in tandem. <\/p>\n Their first attempts were modest, growing from one lens to three, then eight, then 10, and eventually to 48. They dubbed their array Dragonfly. <\/p>\n Based under dark skies in New Mexico, the researchers used their unusual instrument to probe the local universe for anything dim enough to have escaped notice.<\/p>\n What they found were \u201cultra diffuse galaxies<\/a>,\u201d a class of astronomical objects that have surprisingly few stars relative to their mass. <\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n Dragonfly 44 is an ultra-diffuse galaxy that the Dragonfly Array located 330 million light years away from our solar system.Pieter van Dokkum \/NASA<\/p>\n Based on the success of Dragonfly, the team then began to muse about a more ambitious project. Instead of looking at targets with few stars, what about regions of the universe with no stars at all? Might a bigger version of Dragonfly coax the cosmic web out of the shadows?<\/p>\n Deborah Lokhorst, now a research scientist at the Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre in Victoria, was a PhD student looking for a project when Dr. Abraham told her about the idea for MOTHRA.<\/p>\n She said her immediate reaction was: \u201cThat sounds amazing and I will be working on that with you.\u201d<\/p>\n The core of her PhD work became the technical innovation that makes MOTHRA different from Dragonfly.<\/p>\n In order to see the cosmic web, MOTHRA must first peer through the fog of interstellar gas that exists within our own Milky Way galaxy. The way to do this is with a special type of filter that allows only certain wavelengths of light to pass through. <\/p>\n Because gas outside the Milky Way is moving at a different speed than gas embedded inside our galaxy, the light it emits is shifted in wavelength. MOTHRA\u2019s filters are designed to separate that light.<\/p>\n This effect relies on the same physics that causes different colours to appear when a thin film of oil or gasoline is floating on a pool of water. The challenge for Dr. Lokhorst, who is the project director for MOTHRA, was finding a way to control the effect precisely enough to admit only the desired wavelengths of light into its many lenses. <\/p>\n Innovations in Mothra\u2019s camera filters helped to colour-code details about NGC 253, the Sculptor Galaxy. The orange parts are moving away from us, purple toward us.<\/p>\n RCW 114, the the Dragon\u2019s Heart Nebula, is one of the first things Mothra looked at. It\u2019s the remnant of a star that went supernova about 20,000 years ago.<\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n This illustration outlines how light is distributed in the universe on a very, very large scale: In filaments. It’s a close approximation for what MOTHRA is looking for.The Virgo Consortium \/ Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics<\/p>\n This and other hurdles have now been surmounted. The project is funded by a donation from Alex Gerko, the Britain-based financial entrepreneur and founder of XTX Markets. Unlike traditional public-funded science, MOTHRA operates as a \u201cfocused research organization.\u201d It is a not-for-profit entity based on a tech startup model, meant to implement a particular approach to a scientific question. <\/p>\n Although the project\u2019s budget is not public, the cost of the array is in the tens of millions of dollars, the researchers said.<\/p>\n The payoff is a direct test of astronomers\u2019 understanding of how the universe is put together at large scales.<\/p>\n A key part of the picture is dark matter, an unknown substance that makes up most of the mass in the universe, and which forms the bulk of the cosmic web. If MOTHRA can pick up the faint light of gas associated with the web, it will provide a ready-made marker for where dark matter lies.<\/p>\n \u201cDetecting this gas directly by its emission would be a major observational breakthrough, and it would provide a wonderful confirmation that our current understanding about the spatial distribution of matter in the universe is on the right track,\u201d said Julio Navarro, a cosmologist and professor at the University of Victoria, who is not a member of the project.<\/p>\n At a more fundamental level, Dr. Abraham said that whenever astronomers come up with a new way of looking at the cosmos, \u201cthere are always tons of surprises.\u201d<\/p>\n Dr. Lokhorst, said the facility in Chile is now one-third complete and could be operating at its full capacity by the end of this year.<\/p>\n If the cosmic web can be seen, she said, \u201cwe have the best shot out there of actually detecting it.\u201d<\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a>Space is the place: More from Ivan Semeniuk<\/p>\n To probe the cosmos, radio dishes take root in B.C.\u2019s Okanagan Valley<\/a><\/p>\n Is there other life out there? NASA\u2019s Pandora looks for answers<\/a><\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/URNBE3OOZJCXFEKV5BSJNHSBCU.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/W6EFFIKHYZCBPA7XHL7EW6MLPA.jpg\")
<\/p>\n