A massive green hydrogen plant proposed for construction in Chile could increase light pollution at one of the world's most powerful telescopes by at least one-third, says the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the consortium that operates the telescope and will either host or operate others being built nearby. An ESO analysis released on Monday found that light pollution would increase by at least 35% at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) ' one of the most advanced optical telescopes in the world ' and by at least 55% at the southern array of the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO), which is now under construction and will be the largest ground-based observatory for very-high-energy '-ray astronomy. The analysis also found that the green-energy project would increase atmospheric turbulence at the telescopes and cause vibrations that will damage the sensitive equipment. Together, the effects will cause 'devastating, irreversible' damage that cannot be mitigated, astronomer Itziar de Gregorio-Monsalvo, the ESO's representative in Chile, said at a media briefing on Monday. 'It will reach a point where it is highly likely that we won't be able to operate these telescopes.'...

An artist rendering of the Thirty Meter Telescope, planned for construction on Maunakea in Hawaii.Credit: TMT International Observatory/Courtesy of NAOJ with the cooperation of Mitsubishi Electric (CC BY 4.0) They have been planning for years to build the Giant Magellan Telescope on a mountaintop in Chile, and the Thirty Meter Telescope on the Hawaiian mountain Maunakea. Construction has started in Chile, while the Thirty Meter project has been building telescope components and doing other off-site work owing to concerns from Native Hawaiians over Maunakea, which they consider sacred. Both projects are backed by international groups of funders, but neither has the estimated US$3 billion needed to fully fund its telescope. Many astronomers had hoped that the US National Science Foundation (NSF) would contribute money to cover the funding shortfall. But last week the National Science Board, which oversees the NSF, recommended that the agency cap its giant-telescope contributions at $1.6 billion. The board also signalled that it was reluctant for the NSF to spend even that much, citing the need to build other facilities 'across a wide range of science and engineering fields'....

With the increasing interest in lunar exploration, an astrobiologist explores how further access to Earth's natural satellite could help humanity and science....

For radioastronomers, the far side of the Moon could be the last unspoilt refuge in the Solar System. Planet Earth ' and all the human-made electromagnetic noise it spews out into space ' stays permanently below the horizon, so that any radio observatories positioned there would be free to observe the cosmos without interference. But an upcoming boom in lunar exploration could put that at risk. In the next ten years or so, the Moon will be the target of hundreds of orbiters and landers, each of which could create radio noise. Researchers voiced their concerns last month at a conference called Astronomy from the Moon: The Next Decades, which took place at the Royal Society in London. 'Will the far side remain dark' You should already be nervous that I'm asking the question,' Joseph Lazio, a researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, told the conference. The lunar far side has enormous potential for many fields, but it holds unique promise for cosmology. Astronomers have mapped the sky using much of the spectrum of electromagnetic waves, from microwaves to visible light and '-rays. But cosmic radio waves at frequencies below about 100 megahertz are extremely challenging to measure from Earth, because of the planet's noise. And anything below 30 megahertz is completely off-limits because it is absorbed in the ionosphere ' the zone where Earth's atmosphere meets space. These low-frequency waves, however, carry a treasure trove of information about the first billion years or so of the Universe's history....