This Friday, October 9th at five o’clock in the afternoon, the ceremony of the stone laying for the biggest Cherenkov telescope in the northern hemisphere, the prototype of the LST (Large Size Telescope) with a diameter of 23 metres, will take place at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (ORM) on the island of La Palma. Takaaki Kajita, newly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics, will be present at the event.
The ceremony will be performed in two parts. In the first, the principal investigator of the telescope, Masahiro Teshima (member of the ICRR Tokyo and director of the Max Planck Institute for Physics, Munich) and Manel Martínez (member of the IFAE) president of the management committee of the LST, will explain to the authorities the telescope’s structure and functions. In the second, a bakelite plaque will be unveiled on which there is a bas-relief representation of the telescope.
The prototype telescope LST, which will be used to validate the large sized telescopes of the CTA (Cherenkov Telescope Array) could become the first telescope of the array when the agreement between Spain and the CTA consortium, by which the CTA-North is installed in the island of La Palma, comes into force. The CTA will be a major scientific infrastructure comprising 100 telescopes divided between two observatories (North, and South). There are 30 countries participating, with about 1500 engineers and scientists.
The ICCUB participates in the CTA project since its inception and has welcomed many working meetings of the network. ICCUB researchers have been contributing to the Physics and electronics by making simulations of the observations that the CTA will perform of Gamma Ray Binaries. Besides they made a proposal for observing transient galactic objects beneath one of the Key Observation Projects from CTA.