--- title: Looking Through The World's Largest Telescope | TIME description: An astronomer talks about the feeling of looking through the World's largest telescope on Spain's Canary Islands, which is mapping our galaxy like never before. canonical: https://time.com/video/gAyY2KaA/ og:title: Looking Through The World's Largest Telescope og:description: An astronomer talks about the feeling of looking through the World's largest telescope on Spain's Canary Islands, which is mapping our galaxy like never before. og:url: https://time.com/video/gAyY2KaA/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/gAyY2KaA/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Looking Through The World's Largest Telescope twitter:description: An astronomer talks about the feeling of looking through the World's largest telescope on Spain's Canary Islands, which is mapping our galaxy like never before. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/gAyY2KaA/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Looking Through The World's Largest Telescope > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Looking Through The World's Largest Telescope [Watch (HLS stream): Looking Through The World's Largest Telescope](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/gAyY2KaA.m3u8) (5:25)  _Published 2013-05-24. An astronomer talks about the feeling of looking through the World's largest telescope on Spain's Canary Islands, which is mapping our galaxy like never before._ --- Oct 11, 2023 5:55 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Uruguay hosts world's largest barbecue](/video/qIU6UpBG/) ### Uruguay hosts world's largest barbecue [World's Largest Dinosaur Footprints Found in Australia](/video/PK2ACxMD/) ### World's Largest Dinosaur Footprints Found in Australia [WATCH: World's Largest Tomato Fight in Spain](/video/rzMImZa8/) ### WATCH: World's Largest Tomato Fight in Spain --- ## Transcript [ SOUND ] My name is Andrique [ UNKNOWN ], and I'm a researcher at the Institute for, Astrophysics in the Canary Islands. Here at the Rockafellas Muchas, we have, the largest telescope in the world. We have the ten meter class, which is highly competitive. Only. One in about, six or seven people that want to use it actually get to do it. The time is so precious that, for the observers, is given in hours. And this is conducting really, the top of the field astronomy right now, here at the, at the Rocka. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] The GTC is a fairly new telescope, it's been in operation for about a couple of years. So it's still producing it's first science and first discoveries, but with this telescope we have already been able to glimps The composition of the atmospheres of distant worlds, what's called the new exoplanets. Planets around other stars. And, we've also been able to follow dynamics of a stars, along the center of black hole of whole galaxies. And, we've been able to confirm the nature of some of the coolest stars. In the, in the Milky Way Galaxy, was called the Brown Dwarfs. They are very faint but they are very common. And this powerful telescope is able to grasp the composition of the atmospheres and make studies of how these objects are born. [ INAUDIBLE ] We were able to Measure take a spectrum a snapshot of how the earth would look like to an extraterrestial observer and characterize exactly what are the features, the fingerprints of the different components of the atmosphere and of life And we found out that actually it would be pretty easy if you have [ INAUDIBLE ] to determine that this planet is inhabited. And I believe that we will be able to conduct this kind of studies in the next maybe two decades, 20 years from now. So my ulitmate goal would be to detect life somewhere else before I retire. I think that would be really awesome. I would retire pretty happy. There's a revolution going on in the field of astronomy. As hundreds of people working, thousands, hundreds of species students being formed in this field. And the fill of astronomy, theres no going, its already meeting with the field of [ INAUDIBLE ] physics, and i believe these discoveries are possible. [ SOUND ] I do remember that I was interested in the stars and the planet since the very beginning since I remember. I remember I like, I still like science fiction. I might remember reading books when I was about 16 at high school. And watching this famous TV series from Carl Sagan. Christmas, I think at that time i really knew. I really like that, and it would be cool to work on this. So i guess always i have this [ INAUDIBLE ]. A handful of sand convenes about 10000 grains. More than the total number of stars. As we can see with the naked eye on a clear night. But the number of stars we can see is only the tiniest fraction of the number of stars that are. Meanwhile, the cosmos is rich beyond measure. The total number of stars in the universe is larger than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth. It certainly doesn't make me a pessimist or a optimist I think it makes me a realist. It is one of the fundamental questions that we mankind have asked ourselves for thousands of years since we permit the luxury of looking up. It's a fundamental question of all nature. But the fundamental question of astronomy I think would be to understand the universe Which, in the end is understanding ourselves, which is kind of related to finding out if we are alone in the universe or not. I think so. I think its the universe trying ot understand itself, as some people say. 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