Europe’s largest solar telescope was inaugurated Monday at Teide Observatory on the Spanish island of Tenerife, from where it will help researchers observe and better understand the activities of the Sun and also those of the majority of stars in the universe.
During the inauguration of the Gregor telescope, developed by a German consortium, the director of the Astrophysics Institute of the Canaries, Francisco Sanchez, said that the infrastructure for the telescope is a sign of the cooperation that helps development.
The telescope and its main instruments cost 12.85 million euros ($16.4 million) to build.
The Gregor telescope will help scientists to better understand the physical processes that occur in the majority of stars and to answer questions such as how solar activity affects and damages satellites and energy networks on Earth.
The scope’s spatial, spectral and temporal resolution will allow researchers to be able to monitor features on the surface of the Sun as small as 70 kilometers (43.4 miles) in size.
The consortium behind Gregor was led by the Kiepenheuer-Institut fur Sonnenphysik in Freiburg with the Leibniz-Institut fur Astrophysik Potsdam and the Max-Planck-Institut fur Sonnensystemforschung in Katlenburg/Lindau.
Also contributing to the effort were the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, the Institut fur Astrophysik Gottingen, and the Astronomical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.
