About

The Large-Sized Telescope (LST) is one of three types of telescopes to be built to cover the Cherenkov Telescope Arrays.

The LST-1, the first telescope constructed on the CTAO north site, was inaugurated in October 2018 and has been undergoing commissioning testing ever since.

The gamma rays that LST detects don’t make it all the way to the earth’s surface. When a gamma ray reaches the earth’s atmosphere it interacts with it, producing cascades of subatomic particles such as electrons and positrons.

Only dozens of Cherenkov photons are created from a very high energy gamma-ray and in order to detect said photons a large and sensitive telescope, such as LST, is needed.

To better understand the initial gamma ray, data from several telescopes will be used to measure the brightness and direction of the Chrenekov flash. This information is digitized and combined with the other telescopes of CTAO which is used by scientists to determine the origin and energy of the initial gamma ray. The data is reduced and sent to scientists around the world to study astronomical objects such as: pulsars, black holes, supernova remnants, and dark matter.

The Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO) is a global initiative to build the world’s largest and most sensitive high-energy gamma-ray observatory with tens of telescopes planned on two sites: one in the northern hemisphere on the island of La Palma, Spain, and the other in the southern hemisphere near Paranal, Chile. CTAO will be the foremost global observatory for very high-energy gamma-ray astronomy over the next decade and beyond and will be the first ground-based gamma-ray astronomy observatory open to the world-wide astronomical and particle physics communities.

CTAO is a unique, ambitious large-scale infrastructure that will expand observations up to a region of the spectrum that has never been seen, opening an entirely new window to our Universe. The CTAO GmbH serves to prepare the design and implementation of the CTAO Observatory. The CTAO works in close cooperation with the CTAO Consortium composed of 1500+ members from 31 countries, which is responsible for directing the science goals of the Observatory and is involved in the design and supply of instrumentation. The CTAO is governed by a council of shareholders from 11 countries and one intergovernmental organization, as well as associate members from two countries.