"Chile es un centro internacional para la Astrofísica y la Cosmología" Kam Arnold, investigador de la Universidad de California San Diego y astrofísico del experimento Polar Bear

Of course, we should be able to describe all of the systems in the universe - planets, stars, galaxies, galaxy clusters - using physics. So I would say that observing the universe is one of the ways, along with other ways such as laboratory tests, that we seek a greater understanding of physics, and a greater knowledge of the diversity of the physical world. I study the cosmic microwave background (CMB). This is light that has been traveling through the universe for more than 13 billion years, coming to us from a time before there were stars or planets, the time when stable hydrogen first formed. From this light we can try to understand the physics of the very early, very high-energy universe. So in this sense we are using astrophysics to investigate high-energy physics, energies more than a billion times higher than the energies created in the Large Hadron Collider. We also can learn about gravitational structure, and from this we can learn about the amount of energy is the universe stored in cosmic neutrinos, and measure the mass of the neutrinos. This is a parameter that has evaded particle physicists so far.

The CMB is most powerful at wavelengths of about 2mm. At these wavelengths, both oxygen and water vapor absorb radiation, so to have the clearest view of the CMB you want to observe from a high, dry place. The Atacama Desert in norther Chile provides such an environment. The only other site on earth of similar quality is the South Pole, which is not as high, but is drier. However, you can observe less of the sky from the South Pole than from a mid-latitude site like Chile, and since seeing a large fraction of the sky is important for our research, Chile is the best site in the world for this science

Measurements of spatial variation in the intensity of the CMB are a cornerstone of our quantitative model of the universe, providing strong evidence that the universe is dominated by matter and forces we know very little about, Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Measurements of the polarization of the CMB have the potential to probe physics at energies we have to other access to, and to produce a map of all the large-scale gravitational structure in the universe.

I think it's amazing that with the CMB we can learn about high-energy physics by looking at slight variations in very low-energy photons all around us, and we can learn about fundamental sub-atomic particles, neutrinos, by looking at the largest gravitational structures in the universe.

Of course! Chile has a natural resource, these beautiful sites from which to observe the sky. That resource brings scientist from all over the world, making Chile an international center for astrophysics and cosmology.