Part 5/9:
One may wonder why size matters in the world of telescopes. The answer lies in a telescope's ability to observe faint celestial objects, a capability directly linked to the area of its primary mirror. The ELT is expected to push beyond the limits of human perception, detecting objects with a magnitude exceeding 30 — nearly 4 billion times fainter than what we can see with the naked eye. Such sensitivity affords astronomers the potential to study phenomena like the early galaxies formed after the Big Bang and, critically, to analyze the atmospheres of distant exoplanets.