The wind blew across the mountainous Chilean plain and rustled the hearty flora littering the arid landscape. Above, a vast canvas of sky encircled the horizon. Not a single cloud besmirched its perfect blue hue.



Suddenly, an explosion thundered in the distance, followed by a reddish brown plume of dirt and debris. The blast was hailed as a "Big Bang on Earth;" seventy more will follow. It's all part of a grand plan to move a mountaintop in order to "mine the sky."



Last Friday, preliminary construction began on the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) in the Chilean Andes. A joint operation by a consortium of institutions from the United States, South Korea, and Australia, the telescope is set to be completed by 2018. When finished, the GMT will cast its gaze into the star-laden heavens and supplant the Gran Telescopio Canarias as the largest land-based optical telescope.





A computer-rendered image of the Giant Magellan Telescope.



Think of a telescope as a bucket that collects light. The bigger the bucket, the more light it collects. Many people think that the most important quality of a telescope is how much it magnifies an object (certainly cheap 'scope manufacturers advertise them that way!), but what is usually more important is how faint an object the 'scope can see. In that case, the more light you collect, the fainter you'll see. So over the years, telescope makers have focused on making telescopes bigger and bigger.



The tiny white speck is a truck. That's a big telescope...



But GMT's size dominance may not last for long. When completed, its optical collecting surface diameter will measure a considerable 24.5 meters - the current champion is 10.4 meters. But GMT is slated to be outdone by the Thirty Meter Telescope in Hawaii before the end of the decade. And after the Thirty Meter Telescope comes the European Extremely Large Telescope , slated to carry a mirror with a considerable 39.3-meter diameter. (It was originally intended to be named the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope and to have a 100 meter lens!)This size competition is not merely motivated by astronomical pride. When it comes to telescopes, size matters. As explained by "The Bad Astronomer" Phil Plait:The overt benefit of these burgeoning telescopes is that mankind's gaze into outer space will be tremendously magnified. With this enlarged scope of clarity, scientists may be able to answer some of the most intriguing and mystifying questions . What exactly is dark matter? How did the first galaxies form? What is the fate of the universe? Are we alone?But the most exciting possibility presented by these revolutionary telescopes is not that we will be able to answer our current questions, but that we may conceive of entirely new questions to ask! Who knows what unimaginable discoveries are lurking just out of sight, waiting to be seen?By the end of this decade, they may come into view.