Simons Foundation Gives $40M for Astronomy Facility in Chile
The Simons Foundation has given $38.4 million to establish a new astronomy facility in Chile’s Atacama Desert, adding new telescopes and new detectors to existing instruments in order to boost ongoing studies of the evolution of the universe, from its earliest moments to today. The Heising-Simons Foundation is providing an additional $1.7 million to support the project.
The Simons Observatory is a collaboration among Princeton University, the University of California at San Diego, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, all of which are also providing financial support.
The observatory will allow scientists to probe the subtle properties of the cosmic microwave background radiation, in particular its polarization, to better understand what took place a fraction of a second after the Big Bang...