the essential
At Mount Paranal in northern Chile, a massive industrial project is endangering the darkest place on the planet, so dear to astronomers, and home to the world’s largest astronomical observatories.
Turn off the light on Earth to better see all those in the sky. In search of ever more darkness, astronomers are fighting today to preserve it. But one of their most precious playgrounds, Mount Paranal, in the middle of the desert in northern Chile, could be in danger, as an article in The Conversation explains.
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The announcement from the company AES Andes came in December 2024: a gigantic construction project for a large industrial site called INNA. Costing more than $10 billion and covering 3,000 hectares of land with the installation of a port, it aims to launch massive production of hydrogen and ammonia for export. But what worries astronomers even more is its location: between 5 and 12 kilometers from the purest sky in the world.
A view like no other
It is not without reason that this place is plunged into darkness. Mount Paranal is located in the middle of the Atacama Desert (one of the hottest in the world), protected by the immense Andes Mountains, overlooking the clouds at an altitude of 2,600 m. But above all: 120 kilometers from the first city. Ideal conditions for the most sophisticated astronomical observation devices, such as the Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), to always see bigger.
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And it works, since it is thanks to these machines of formidable complexity that we were able to observe the first image of an exoplanet in 2004. The VLT also received the honors of two Nobel Prizes, in 2011 for the discovery of the acceleration of the expansion of the universe, and for the research carried out on the supermassive black holes of our Milky Way in 2020.
So many elements that make Mount Paranal a unique place in the world, and protected by numerous restrictions to limit light pollution as much as possible. It is therefore difficult for scientists to understand such a turnaround.
An astronomical loss of horizons
A project like INNA, currently undergoing an environmental audit, will, according to The Conversation experts, multiply light pollution by two or three, causing the Chilean sky to lose its status as “the purest sky in the world.” Many celestial objects would also no longer be visible from the Earth’s surface, galaxies for example.
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This would finally jeopardize many scientific projects planned for the years to come in this area, such as new telescopes, to see ever further and ever stronger. Space scientists are therefore calling, in line with their fight for the decarbonization of society, for the preservation of this unique starry sky in the world.
