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  • SPOTLIGHT

Chile’s chance to embrace science for the twenty-first century

The country excels at stargazing, but it must boost its expertise to find a niche in a globalized world.
By
  1. Aleszu Bajak

    1. Aleszu Bajak is a freelance science journalist who teaches at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.

Early this year, in the middle of the Atacama Desert, Chile started building what will be one of the world’s biggest telescopes. The European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), slated to cost more than US$1 billion and debut in 2024, will no doubt boost the country’s already massive output of astronomy and astrophysics research. In 2016, Chile published around 1,300 studies in those fields.

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Nature 552, S53-S55 (2017)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-017-08385-0

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