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Panchromatic Robotic Optical Monitoring and Polarimetry Telescopes
 The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has been awarded two grants totaling $912,000 from the National Science Foundation to build six special purpose telescopes at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in the Chilean Andes. These telescopes, which have been specifically designed to identify and study the most distant objects in the universe, will also serve as a platform for undergraduate and high school education throughout the state of North Carolina.
Called PROMPT (which stands for "Panchromatic Robotic Optical Monitoring and Polarimetry Telescopes"), these telescopes have been specifically designed to study very powerful but very distant explosions called gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). Astronomers have only recently learned that GRBs result when stars that are more than thirty times as massive as the sun reach the end of their lives and collapse to form black holes. The GRB is the birth cry of the black hole.
Please visit the PROMPT homepage for more information...
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