It's not your usual opening event for a scientific facility. Most ribbon-cuttings do not require medical clearance. Most guests do not arrive with oxygen packs.
But this Thursday (April 9), Dr. Scott Chapman and a bus full of academic and government dignitaries at least those cleared to make the ascent will climb high into the Chilean Andes toward a new telescope, where even stepping out for a brief ceremony can leave visitors foggy and short of breath.
"Yeah, well, you need to use oxygen to work up there. It's Everest base camp height," says Dr. Chapman, Killam Professor in Astrophysics at Dalhousie. "Unless you've acclimatized over many weeks, it's impossible to function without oxygen tubes."
It's the highest altitude a telescope has ever been placed.
The new Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (FYST) is stationed 5,600 meters above sea level in northern Chile, a landscape Dr. Chapman describes as high-altitude desert. He says it's "the highest altitude a telescope has ever been placed."
The site team after successfully installing the first mirror (March 19, 2026). Courtesy of CCAT Observatory.
The project is led by Cornell University's CCAT Observatory, a collaboration that includes a consortium of German and Canadian universities including Dalhousie in conjunction with Chilean astronomers through the University of Chile.
Capturing the universe
While punishing, the thin air is also the point says Dr. Chapman, who led the design and construction of onboard camera systems. The extreme altitude means less moisture in the atmosphere to interfere with the instrument's view ideal conditions for capturing images of the universe.
Unlike human eyes, which perceive cosmic shapes by the light they emit, Dr. Chapman says the telescope observes submillimetre wavelengths the faint signals that sit between radio and infrared. It can also observe massive swaths of the sky at once. It's powerful enough to scan about 1,000 times the area seen by a conventional telescope, surpassing similar submillimetre telescope facilities.
From its perch high in Atacama Desert, Dr. Chapman says the new telescope will open new "windows through the atmosphere" to survey vast tracts of cosmos. He says the data produced will give scientists new insights into how galaxies formed beginning in the early universe and how stars are born in our own galaxy.
Supercharged pixels
The camera systems Dr. Chapman helped produce for the telescope are far removed from your average smartphone setup. Developed with $500,000 in support from the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the image-making devices use quantum-based detector technology to build graphic depictions of our evolving galaxy.
He says the novelty of the technology is not obvious from the physical construction.
"If I showed you a design of it, it just looks like the inside of a camera. Four lenses, some filters, digital pixels sitting at the focal point of it."
What makes it different are the processors that power it.
One of the detector arrays that allows the camera to capture faint signals from space. (Scott Chapman photo)
"It's a digital camera in a sense, like the camera on your phone, but it uses quantum mechanical techniques to detect the light. It's a very advanced technological development that we're trying to pioneer."
Like a conventional digital camera, Dr. Chapman's instrument captures information pixel by pixel. But each pixel uses quantum-based superconducting technology, making the camera far more sensitive to the faint signals associated with star formation.
The concept was developed nearly 30 years ago by one of Dr. Chapman's colleagues. But turning it into a working instrument has required decades of engineering, including close collaboration with a lab in Boulder, Colorado, culminating in its first application in the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope.
A star is born
Dr. Chapman says the new camera provides greater sensitivity to "the cold things," in the outer reaches of the galaxy. To work, the instrument must be chilled to near absolute zero. That extreme operating environment is what facilitates the camera's unusual sensitivity to detect cold masses of gas and observe their transformation into the stars.
W51 Nebula - One of the largest "Star Factories" in the Milky Way - August 25, 2020. (NASA/JPL-Caltech image)
"They start as a very cold puff which is about 30 kelvins, about minus 240 degrees Celsius. And then, as they collapse, they heat up, and eventually the temperature reaches the temperature at the centre of the sun," says Dr. Chapman.
He explains that this process is the consequence of gravitational energy being turned into thermal energy. The more tightly packed particals are drawn together the hotter they get.
This telescope is good at seeing when stars like our sun are just starting to form.
"We like to pretend temperature is something we feel in response to how much sunlight there is," he says, "but temperature is the kinetic energy of the particles."
Dr. Chapman's camera systems capture the collapsing of these cosmic structures and the concentration of their kinetic energy as they become more tightly packed, giving researchers a clearer view of how stars are created and galaxies arise.
"This telescope is good at seeing when stars like our sun are just starting to form," says Dr. Chapman. "We're getting to see stars just starting in our galaxy and capture them taking shape."
