Part of the ensemble of dishes forming South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope is seen in Carnarvon on July 16, 2016
Even operating at a quarter of its eventual capacity, South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope showed off its phenomenal power Saturday, revealing 1,300 galaxies in a tiny corner of the universe where only 70 were known before. MeerKAT’s full contingent of 64 receptors will be integrated next year into a multi-nation Square Kilometre Array (SKA) which is is set to become the world’s most powerful radio telescope.
Fernando Camilo said at the site of the dishes near the small town of Carnarvon, 600 km north of Cape Town, “This telescope as is today, only one quarter of the way down (to its full contingent) is”. When fully up and running in the 2020s, the SKA will comprise a forest of 3,000 dishes spread over an area of a square kilometre (0.4 square miles) across remote terrain around several countries to peer deeper into space in unparallelled detail.
Montage of MeerKAT First Light radio image and four zoomed-in insets. The two panels to the right show distant galaxies with massive black holes at their centers. At lower left is a galaxy approximately 200 million light years away, where hydrogen gas is being used up to form stars in large numbers. Credit: MeerKAT
It will have a discovery potential 10,000 times greater than the most advanced modern instruments and will explore exploding stars, black holes, dark energy and traces of the universe’s origins some 14 billion years ago.
MeerKAT is being built in the remote and arid southwest of the Karoo region of South Africa that offers prime conditions for astronomers. It will serve as one of the two main clusters of SKA. The other will be in Australia. Some 200 scientists, engineers and technicians working in collaboration with industry, local and foreign universities have developed the technologies, hardware and software systems for MeerKAT. “We can now expect when the 64 dishes are in place next year, it will be the best telescope, not only in the southern hemisphere but in the world,” said Pandor.
When fully up and running in the 2020s, the SKA will comprise a forest of 3,000 dishes spread over an area of a square kilometre (0.4 square miles) across remote terrain around several countries
More than 20 countries are members of the SKA, including Britain which hosts the headquarters of the project. Despite its slowing economy, South Africa, which hosts the bulk of the SKA project, has so far invested 3 billion rands ($205 million) into the telescope project, funded mainly from the public purse and science research partners.
Already some 500 scientific groups from 45 countries have booked slots to use the MeerKAT array between next year and 2022.
“What this will do is bring to South African and world astronomers, the most astonishing and profoundly powerful instrument ever used before in radio astronomy,” SKA South Africa project director Rob Adam told AFP.
http://phys.org/news/2016-07-image-world-super-radio-telescope.htmljCp
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