On a remote hilltop 8,000 feet above sea level in Chile’s Atacama Desert, scientists hope to answer one of the most fundamental questions facing humankind: Is there life elsewhere in the universe?
That’s one of various goals of the Giant Magellan Telescope, or GMT, now in the early stages of construction and scheduled to start scanning outer space in 2021. Once it does, it’s expected to offer views of the farthest depths of the universe ever achieved.
With seven curved mirrors giving it a record optical surface 80 feet in diameter, the GMT will have the sharpest images of any telescope ever built. Its resolution will be 10 times better than that of the Hubble Space Telescope.
Poor science in the original article linked to. We have not reached the period of 50 to 100 Billion years after the big bang yet so the scope cannot view light from that era, which is still in the future. If speaking of the 50 to 100 million years after the big bang era then there were probably too few heavier elements yet created for life to form on any early planets. Any life search will need to look for Oxygen atmospheres and water on planets circling relatively close stars from my understanding.