Astronomers met at the UC to address the contribution of the project TAO

This Monday, May 29, at the San Joaquín campus of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, the first “TAO Workshop” was held, organized by the Institute of Astrophysics and the University of Tokyo. The event took place in the Nino Bralic auditorium and brought together fifty researchers related to astronomy, mainly from Chile and Japan, around the impacts and contributions that the Tokio Atacama Observatory (TAO) will add to the knowledge of the universe. The conference was also attended by graduate students and postdocs from the UC Institute of Astrophysics.

TAO is a project in the construction stage, developed by the University of Tokyo (Japan), and considers the construction of the observatory with the highest elevation above the earth, at 5,640 meters high, on the summit of Chajnantor Hill in the Atacama Desert . It is a 6.5 meter diameter telescope, optimized to detect infrared radiation. TAO will allow us to very precisely study star formation in other galaxies, objects in the Solar System, the disks of planetary systems in formation, and the emission of light from very distant galaxies (existing since the youngest era of the universe), among other investigations. Its entry into operation is expected at the beginning of 2025.