London, 18 April 2011 (MIA) - A telescope buried up to half a mile underground could give scientists their first glimpse of the dawn of the universe.
The ambitious new device is designed to detect gravitational waves – an elusive phenomena created by some of the most violent events in the universe such as black holes, neutron stars and the Big Bang.
Although they have never been directly detected, these waves of gravity are thought to echo through the universe like ripples from a stone thrown into a pond and they could provide scientists with a new way of mapping the sky.
The telescope, which is likely to cost between £500 million and £1 billion to build, will be built inside a network of tunnels 12 miles long and buried up to half a mile underground to dampen any interference from vibrations on the surface.
The project is expected to rival the Large Hadron Collider, the 17 mile particle smasher on the French Swiss Border that was switched on in 2008, in its scale and ambition.
Physicists claim the telescope will give them the first chance to see a black hole, which until now have only been detected indirectly because of the stars and debris orbiting them, and see into the centre of powerful stars known as neutron stars.
The telescope, called the Einstein Telescope, could also reveal for the first time whether there were universes in existence before our own by looking for the echoes of previous Big Bangs similar to the one that created our own universe 13.7 billion years ago.
Highly precise lasers will be beamed along two six mile long vacuum chambers to detect minute changes in the distance between targets at either end caused by gravitational waves passing through the Earth.
Professor B S Sathyaprakash, an astrophysicist at Cardiff University and chair of the science working party for the Einstein Telescope, said: "There is huge potential to see the universe in a completely new way with gravitational waves.
"They are very weak by the time they reach the Earth, but with a sensitive detector we will be able to get direct evidence for black holes, learn more about how the universe is expanding and pick up some of the gravitational waves from the big bang.
"If we are really lucky we get some signals from before the big bang that might help explain what existed before our own universe and whether we are living in just one of a continuous cycle of big bangs and rapid expansions."
Scientists behind the project, which is being led by the European Gravitational Observatory, are due to hold a meeting in Pisa, Italy next month to outline their plans for the new telescope.