9 European Countries Collaborate on European Solar Telescope

As many as nine European countries, including the UK, are working together to construct the European Solar Telescope (EST). The EST will be the biggest of its kind solar telescope ever constructed in Europe. It is intended to provide insights into the phenomena of space weather.

Several UK universities are leading a consortium to develop designs for the construction of EST. The agreement sees six UK universities, including Sheffield, Aberystwyth, Belfast, Durham, Exeter and Glasgow, along with six European countries, commit to the construction of the telescope at the world-renowned El Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, at La Palma in Spain. The first light, or becoming operational, of the new device is expected to go ahead between 2028 and 2029.

The EST project aims to provide valuable insights into the mechanisms underlying solar flares and coronal mass ejections. These events determine so-called ‘space weather’, which can lead to geomagnetic storms on Earth – seen as the northern lights – and have a strong influence on our technological society.

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Ready for Construction

The University of Sheffield is developing designs for the capability of the project to process huge amounts of data captured by the telescope. It is estimated that the EST will produce a petabyte of data per day, roughly equivalent to the amount of data used to store more than 220,000 films. Sheffield will be responsible for how the project can handle and analyse some of this data, which, at the moment, few scientific projects around the world come close to doing.

The preliminary design phase of the European Solar Telescope, which was funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme, has recently been completed.

Moreover, the recent establishment of the EST Foundation marks a crucial milestone in advancing the project towards its construction phase. One of the Foundation’s primary objectives is to create a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC), which will bring together the national ministries of the partner countries.

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Professor Robertus von Fay-Siebenburgen, from the University of Sheffield’s School of Mathematics and Statistics, will be a principal investigator for the UKUC project. He said, “The EST will be the biggest ground-based solar telescope constructed in Europe and will keep its European partners at the forefront of solar physics research, so it’s fantastic that so many UK partners have been able to come together to join the EST Canary Foundation today.”