Construction underway of world’s largest all-lens telescope, unmatched by any existing instrument on Earth or in space

First-of-its-kind telescope funded by Alex Gerko

NEW HAVEN, Conn. and TORONTO and NEW YORK and LONDON, March 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Dragonfly FRO, LLC, a Focused Research Organization (FRO), today announced the construction of MOTHRA, a next-generation telescope designed to reveal the cosmic web — the vast network of gas and dark matter that connects galaxies across the universe. MOTHRA employs a first-of-its-kind distributed aperture architecture with special filters to isolate the faint light of hydrogen gas. The FRO, a new type of scientific enterprise, was launched in partnership with Convergent Research and backed by Alex Gerko, the founder and CEO of XTX Markets.

Dragonfly FRO was founded in January 2025, and now introduces its mission, team, and technology alongside the launch of its website: mothratelescope.org.

A Radical New Telescope Design for Probing the Spaces Between Galaxies

MOTHRA is a distributed-aperture telescope composed of 1,140 high-end Canon telephoto lenses, which together synthesize the power of a single giant telescope. This design has grown out of the Dragonfly Telephoto Array concept which demonstrated the capability to find and study extremely faint, extended structures, previously undetected using conventional telescopes.

MOTHRA is a dramatic upscaling of Dragonfly, enabling it to detect ultra-faint gas between galaxies that traces the dark matter distribution of the Universe. This “cosmic web” is a complex network of structures imprinted in space at the earliest moments after the Big Bang, growing to enormous size as the Universe expanded. MOTHRA can be precisely tuned to detect faint glowing light from intergalactic gas trapped by this web of dark matter. The telescope will not just reveal where the gas is, but also how it moves along the spokes of the web.

“MOTHRA is a telescope designed around a single idea: maximize discovery space for the dim glow of intergalactic gas,” said Pieter van Dokkum, Co-Founder of Dragonfly FRO. “The combination of a huge effective aperture, wide field, and tunable ultra-narrowband filtering opens a new observational regime.”

MOTHRA is being built at Obstech / El Sauce Observatory in Chile. The telescope’s construction started in the spring of 2025 and it is expected to become fully operational by the end of 2026. By fusing its many images together digitally, the array of 1,140 telephoto lenses will be the equivalent of a single 4.7-meter diameter lens. It will be the world’s largest all-lens telescope, with capabilities that are unmatched by any other telescope on Earth or in space.

“This is an ambitious project to build something astronomers have wanted for a long time: a practical way to directly see the cosmic web, and to get it done in a couple of years rather than decades,” said Roberto Abraham, Co-Founder of Dragonfly FRO. “MOTHRA harnesses advances in optics, detectors, and computing power to look at the universe in a new way. The telescope is totally unique.”

A New Model for Tackling Hard Scientific Problems

Dragonfly FRO is the first Focused Research Organization centered on astrophysics. Inspired by the pace and focus of tech startups, FROs are designed to tackle bottlenecks and build high-impact scientific public goods over a finite multi-year timeline. These efforts are often too large or too infrastructure-heavy for a single academic lab and don’t fit traditional funding structures or market-driven models.

“Focused Research Organizations are built for precisely this kind of problem: a clear mission, a hard technical bottleneck, and a capability that can benefit an entire field,” said Anastasia Gamick, President and Co-Founder of Convergent Research. “Dragonfly FRO brings the FRO model to astrophysics, and MOTHRA is the kind of ambitious, enabling instrument that this model makes possible.”

The launch of Dragonfly FRO and MOTHRA has been made possible through a donation from Alex Gerko. “Breakthrough instruments developed at speed often require new approaches — organizationally and technically,” said Gerko. “I’m proud to support such an ambitious project focused on generating long-term scientific value, and to help pioneer a model designed to drive meaningful research progress on hard, foundational astronomical challenges.”

Pieter van Dokkum said, “Alex’s impact on this project extends well beyond funding. He has been a hands-on strategic partner from the start — shaping how we structured the organization, helping us find the right project partners and site, and guiding us through procurement and infrastructure challenges that would have slowed us down considerably.”

Learn More

To learn more about Dragonfly FRO and the MOTHRA telescope – including its mission, technical approach, and updates – visit mothratelescope.org.

About Dragonfly FRO, LLC

Dragonfly FRO, LLC is a focused research organization advancing new observational capabilities to study ultra-faint astrophysical structures, including the cosmic web of diffuse ionized gas connecting galaxies. Dragonfly FRO operates as a mission-driven organization assembling dedicated scientific and engineering teams to build high-impact, field-enabling capabilities over a focused multi-year timeframe.

About Convergent Research

Convergent Research is a non-profit organization that brings together scientific founders and funders to design, launch and operate Focused Research Organizations (FROs) across a range of fields. Convergent Research’s FROs, like Dragonfly, are building pivotal infrastructure that bridges gaps to breakthrough scientific research, proving out a new operating model for science that enables a high level of team science and systems engineering for public goods creation.

About Alex Gerko

Alex Gerko is Founder and CEO of XTX Markets. XTX Markets is a leading algorithmic trading firm which uses state-of-the-art machine learning technology to produce price forecasts for over 50,000 financial instruments.

Alex and XTX Markets are major philanthropic donors, supporting a wide range of initiatives in math and science education, research and talent (as well as classical music and the arts). In 2025, Alex donated $10 million to Lean FRO and Mathlib, and XTX Markets created a $31.5 million AI for Math Fund, together designed to strengthen open-source infrastructure for formal theorem proving and the use of AI in frontier mathematics research. In the field of astronomy, besides MOTHRA, working alongside Schmidt Sciences, Alex is co-funding the construction of the Argus Array, a massive new telescope system being developed at the University of North Carolina. Alex also donated $2.5 million to complete and deploy two key instruments at the CCAT Observatory, which houses the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope.