What Survives within the Atacama Desert?

BY THE TIME I arrived on the European Southern Observatory web site at Paranal, I might really feel the dryness in my physique. A headache nagged. The astronomers there mentioned sometimes their pores and skin itched; they didn’t sleep effectively. “Typically you appear to be a 100-year-old individual,” mentioned Florian Rodler, a 44-year-old employees astronomer initially from Austria. However the observatory, 80 miles south of the coastal metropolis of Antofagasta, is among the finest websites on the earth for trying into area. Its Very Massive Telescope is perched at 8,645 toes atop an explosive-flattened mountaintop, the place the ambiance is comparatively steady and extremely dry. Nearly 90 p.c of the nights are clear. I requested about essentially the most distant object the V.L.T. has seen, and Rodler answered by way of time slightly than area: a couple of hundred million years after the Huge Bang, when the primary galaxies had been starting to kind. Every little thing we see in area is previously. “Right here we gather the sunshine of the universe,” a Paranal engineer advised me. The sunshine from the moon takes 1.3 seconds to succeed in us. The solar’s gentle, about eight minutes. The closest stars’, just a little greater than 4 years. From some stars, we’re seeing gentle from when the Chinchorros had been making their first mummies. From distant galaxies, the sunshine collected by the V.L.T. was emitted lengthy earlier than the Earth was fashioned. Twelve miles away on one other flattened mountaintop, E.S.O. is constructing a brand new telescope, the Extraordinarily Massive Telescope, which can be used for, amongst different functions, attempting to find exoplanets that may assist life.

I spent the evening within the residencia for scientific employees, an extended, low construction constructed into the mountainside downhill from the V.L.T. that, within the James Bond movie “Quantum of Solace” (2008), stands in for a Bolivian eco-hotel that will get spectacularly blown up. My room was easy, with a twin mattress and a view onto the Mars-like crimson panorama. The principle constructing has a big, translucent dome that allows daylight however should be coated at evening. For the sake of the telescopes, all gentle should be contained.

On my manner again to the residencia, I finished and regarded up on the billowing arch of the Milky Approach. The air was chilly, clear and silent. The darkness was thick and velvety and, overhead, the universe receded and receded. The realm of the lifeless, the realm of the celebs. It appears pure to wish to join the 2, to attract a hyperlink between two nice unknowns. The Atacama, for all its vacancy, will not be a void. It’s, by quirks of nature and accidents of human ingenuity, a bridge throughout the best void. The desert, in its dryness, retains the lifeless and opens the sky.

Retouching: Nameless Retouch. Picture assistant: Karl Leitz. Drone operator: Francisco Petersen

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