Construction has started on MOTHRA, a new telescope designed to map the universe's cosmic web. This instrument will detect faint gas between galaxies and help trace dark matter.
Once finished, MOTHRA will be the world's largest telescope made entirely of lenses. Engineers are building it at the El Sauce Observatory, and it should be fully operational by late 2026.
The project comes from Dragonfly FRO, a research group started in 2025 to create special scientific tools. Alex Gerko, CEO of XTX Markets, provided funding, with extra support from Convergent Research. Scientists believe this telescope could open new ways to study the universe's large-scale structure.
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Start Your News DetoxA Telescope Made of Lenses
Unlike most observatories that use large mirrors, MOTHRA uses 1,140 Canon telephoto lenses. These lenses work together as a "distributed aperture system," combining images digitally. When put together, they act like a single lens about 4.7 meters wide.
This design builds on an earlier idea called the Dragonfly Telephoto Array. That system showed that groups of telephoto lenses can find very faint cosmic structures that regular telescopes often miss. Engineers greatly expanded this idea for MOTHRA.
The telescope also uses special filters that only let through faint light from hydrogen gas between galaxies. Pieter van Dokkum, Co-Founder of Dragonfly FRO, explained that MOTHRA was designed to find the dim glow of intergalactic gas. Researchers think its wide view and sensitivity could help astronomers see signals that were previously impossible to detect.
Aiming for the Cosmic Web
The cosmic web is the largest structure in the universe. It's made of long gas filaments shaped by dark matter, connecting galaxies over huge distances. Scientists think these structures began forming soon after the Big Bang. Over billions of years, gravity pulled matter into this web-like pattern across the universe.
Galaxies gather along these filaments, but the gas between them is extremely faint. MOTHRA aims to detect the dim glow of hydrogen trapped in this network. By observing this gas, astronomers hope to map the cosmic web directly and study how matter moves through it.
Roberto Abraham, Co-Founder of Dragonfly FRO, called it an ambitious project to directly see the cosmic web. The telescope also shows a new way to organize big research projects. Dragonfly works as a Focused Research Organization (FRO), a model designed to solve major scientific problems within a set time.
These organizations act more like startups than traditional labs. They focus on building special tools or infrastructure that entire research fields can use. Dragonfly FRO is the first to use this model in astrophysics.
Funding from Alex Gerko helped speed up the telescope's development. Gerko noted that breakthrough instruments often need new approaches, both in organization and technology. Researchers expect MOTHRA to start scientific observations after construction ends in 2026. If it works, the telescope could offer the clearest views yet of the faint structures that shape the universe.
