It has been announced Thursday, December 4th, the European Souther Observatory (ESO) approved plans for the largest telescope ever constructed, to be built in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The world’s largest telescope is scheduled to be completed by 2024, while costing $1.3 billion dollars to build. This massive instrument will be the essential tool scientists and astronomers need to find new planets, discover other solar systems and ultimately discover extraterrestrial life.

The ESO is a unique coalition of 15 nations of Europe and South America, working together as an astronomy organization that first proposed the massive telescope in 2006. The project had to be met with the condition that 90 percent of the projects funding be financed by the countries in the ESO. On Wednesday, the ESO council had announced their financial goals had been met, and construction of the telescope was authorized and would go into planning.

Upon its construction, the telescope will stand as the largest in the world, constructed by a 128-foot wide composite mirror, roughly four times larger than any telescope existing today. The mirrors larger surfacing is said to concentrate the light into the lens at a greater capacity, allowing astronomers to collect nearly 100 million times more light than the human eye. ESO chose Chile to place it on one of its larger mountains in the Chilean desert, to pierce the relatively thin air, providing optimal images of the sky.

It has been reported by VOX the telescope will have a primary function of helping astronomers search for planets in other solar systems. Hopefully to discover small Earth sized planets that possibly harbor alien life. In recent years scientists have found thousands of new exoplanets but only relatively few of them were non-gas giants that could actually harbor signs of life.

“We need big telescopes like this because Earth-like planets are smaller, and have relatively thin atmospheres — so we need to take in a lot of light to analyze them and search for potential signatures of life,” says Lisa Kaltenegger, Director of Cornell’s new Institute for Pale Blue Dots, an institute founded in the fundamental search for Earth-like planets.