ASTRONOMY:
Europe's Telescope Builders Aim High
Govert Schilling
LONDON--At a meeting here last week, rival telescope-building teams from across Europe announced that they will now work together on a joint design for what they hope, 12 years hence, will be the largest telescope in history. The European Large Telescope would take an order-of-magnitude leap from the scale of today's telescopes, which have mirrors about 10 meters across, to one up to 100 meters in diameter, capable of revealing the workings of the universe and examining nearby stars and planets in unimaginable detail.