The Thirty Meter Telescope: an international adventure at the frontier of physics*

The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) is an extremely large telescope that will observe the universe with unprecedented sensitivity and detail. Its 30m diameter primary mirror will enable observations from ultraviolet to mid-infrared wavelengths with up to 80 times the sensitivity of today's largest telescopes. State-of-the-art adaptive optics systems will compensate for the blurring effects of Earth's atmosphere, and deliver images at infrared wavelengths that are more than 12 times sharper than those of the famed Hubble Space Telescope, and four times sharper than JWST. This breakthrough combination of sensitivity and resolution created a compelling case for the U.S. National Academy's ASTRO 2020 Decadal Review that placed extremely large telescopes as the top priority for NSF funding in the coming decade, preferably as part of a two-hemisphere system with the TMT in the northern hemisphere and the Giant Magellan Telescope in the south.

The two-telescope US-ELT will address questions in fundamental physics concerning dark matter and dark energy, test general relativity in unprecedented ways, trace the formation of black holes in a wide range of astrophysical seetings, provide rapid all-sky response to gravitational wave detections, trace the development of large-scale structure in the universe, elucidate the history of chemical enrichment of the universe and explore aspects of star and planet formation that are not accessible in any other way. It may even detect the effects of life on the atmospheres of nearby exoplanets.