 |
| © ska.ac.za |
“Based on the results being shown today, we are
confident that after all 64 dishes are in place, MeerKAT will be the world’s
leading telescope of its kind,” said Professor
Justin Jonas, Chief Technologist at the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project,
which manages MeerKAT. SKA is an international effort to build the world’s
largest and most precise radio telescope.
“This is
very remarkable. We can learn many things about the universe and about how
galaxies are formed and evolved by studying these kinds of images,” Dr.
Fernando Camilo, SKA’s chief scientist, said in commenting on the launch of
MeerKAT.
“In the years to come, MeerKAT will address many
of the key open scientific questions of our age by discovering and studying
thousands and millions of galaxies in the far off universe,” he pointed out.
Camilo also noted that only 16 of the telescope’s dishes have been commissioned
so far, just a quarter of its eventual capacity. Yet he said the images it
captured are “far better than any of us could hope for.”
“[This]
means that this telescope as is today, only one quarter of the way down [to its
full contingent], is already the best radio telescope in the southern
hemisphere,” Camilo said.
When fully operational, MeerKAT will consist of
64 dishes, or receptors, each equipped with an antenna with a 13.5-meter
diameter, cryogenic coolers, and other electronics. Its commissioning is being
conducted in phases to give researchers an opportunity to check the system, as
well as to determine and solve technical issues as they appear, one at a time.
All dishes are expected to be in place and
operational by late 2017. They 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,” researchers claimed in a press release.
The MeerKAT project is mostly funded by the South
African government, which has invested some three billion rands (US$205
million) in the telescope so far. South Africa’s minister of Science and
Technology, Naledi Pandor, said this is
“the first time that an African group of countries will host global science
infrastructure of this character.”
“It’s a
first for us as Africa, and also it’s a first for the world, because the world
hasn’t done this in Africa,” said the minister. “We are building a global
infrastructure for the world.”
“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,” Pandor added.
So far, about 500 scientific groups from some 45
countries have booked slots to use the MeerKAT through 2022.
“What this [telescope] 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.
MeerKAT will be one of the
main clusters of SKA, the most sensitive radio telescope in the world,
comprising an entire forest of some 3,000 dishes that will be spread over an
area of one square kilometer around several countries. Set to be put into
operation in the 2020s, it will allow scientists to achieve an unprecedented
level of detailed space exploration. Over 20 countries are members of the SKA
project, which has its headquarters in the UK.
South African Super-Telescope
Reveals Distant Galaxies And Black Holes
Even operating at a quarter of its eventual
capacity, South Africa’s MeerKat radio telescope showed off its phenomenal
power on Saturday, revealing 1,300 galaxies in a tiny corner of the universe
where only 70 were known before.
 |
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. © ska.ac.za
|
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.
The images produced by MeerKat “are far better
than we could have expected”, the chief scientist of the SKA in South Africa,
Fernando Camilo, said at the site of the dishes near the small town of
Carnarvon, 600 kilometres north of Cape Town.
This “means that this telescope, as is today only
one quarter of the way down (to its full contingent), is already the best radio
telescope in the southern hemisphere,” Camilo told AFP.
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
allow astronomers to peer deeper into space in unparallelled detail.
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 which
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.
The South African minister of Science and
Technology, Naledi Pandor, said “this the first time that an African group of
countries will host global science infrastructure of this character.”
“It’s a first for us as Africa and also it’s a
first for the world because the world hasn’t done this in Africa,” said the
minister. “We are building a global infrastructure for the world.”
“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.
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 bn rand (US$205m) 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,” the SKA South Africa
project director, Rob Adam, said.
 |
| View showing 10% of the full MeerKAT First Light radio image. More than 200 astronomical radio sources (white dots) are visible in this image, where prior to MeerKAT only five were known (indicated by violet circles). This image spans about the area of the Earth's moon. © ska.ac.za |
Africa Could Host
The World's Most Powerful Telescope
South Africa battles Australia and New Zealand
for vast £1.3bn stargazer Square Kilometre Array project
On September 14, 2016 The Guardian had reported:
Sitting in a white prefab hut, Lindsay Magnus
punches a code into a computer beneath bands of red, green and blue
representing the Centaurus A galaxy. Beyond the window, seven giant dishes turn
in unison, throwing shadows across the gravel. Their target lies millions of
light years away in the cosmos.
Magnus and his colleagues are aiming to build the
world's biggest telescope. It will cost £1.3bn and consist of thousands of
dishes with a total surface area of one square kilometre. It will generate
enough raw data to fill 15m 64 GB iPods every day, requiring a supercomputer
1,000 times faster than currently exists. It will peer back to a time before
the first stars and galaxies formed and offer our best chance yet of detecting
alien intelligence.
And there is a strong chance the telescope will
be African. Bids will be submitted on Thursday to host the Square Kilometre Array (SKA),
an instrument that turns radio waves into pictures of galaxies, exploding stars
and other space phenomena. The contest pitches South Africa (in partnership with eight other
African countries) against Australia and New Zealand.
Both contenders offer vast tracts of land with
tiny populations – vital to avoid interference from mobile phones and other
electronics. Both are also in the southern hemisphere, which offers a better
perspective on the centre of our galaxy but which has been relatively neglected
to date. An old joke has it: "God put all the astronomers in the northern
hemisphere and all the interesting objects in the southern."
But Africa would
also have political purchase. A continent often written off as broken and
doomed, and a backwater of scientific research is on the verge of landing one
of the most important astronomical projects of the early 21st century. Much was
said about last year's football World Cup as a blow to
"Afro-pessimism."
The SKA could be a galvanizing moment for its
intellectual capital, self-confidence and prestige around the world. "I
work in a world class field and now I can do it at home, I don't have to go
overseas," said Magnus, commissioning scientist at the Karoo Array
Telescope (KAT-7), a prototype of the SKA. "If it comes to Africa,
conversations will happen that never could have happened.
"If you were to think about the way to
impact people here with science, there's no better way. Children already know
there's something big going on – it's broadening their horizons. It's very
different from the daily toll of war, famine and poverty."
KAT-7 is an array of seven 16-metre-tall dishes
undergoing tests in the Karoo desert. Staff charter a weekly flight from Cape
Town to the Northern
Cape village of Carnarvon, then drive for an hour into a wilderness
where only sheep, springboks and hardy farmers venture. Mobile phone reception
soon disappears, which is just the way the researchers like it.
This is a quarantined zone where anything that
emits radio frequency interference (RFI) is like an infectious disease.
Internet connections are by fibre optic cables only. "Wifi is a curse word
round here," one scientist observed.
Such is the dishes' sensitivity that their
"cold" receivers are cryogenically cooled to about 70 kelvin (-203C)
to reduce "noise". Banks of data servers, with green and red lights
scrolling left and right below humming air conditioners, are sealed inside
RFI-shielded containers with thick metal doors providing "radio
airlocks".
The staff kitchen, including a potentially
intrusive microwave oven, and recreation room are hidden safely behind a lone
hill ("Losberg" in Afrikaans) in isolated buildings that resemble a
lunar base. A notice on the wall gives emergency contact numbers and
reassurance that Carnarvon hospital is "stocked with snake
anti-venom".
The heavy data lifting, however, is performed
hundreds of miles away at a control room beneath Table Mountain in Cape Town.
Here, staff sit at computer screens looking at what appear to be red and yellow
blobs but actually represent 10 hours' observation of galaxies such as PKS
1610-60, some 240m light years away.
Dr Deborah Shepherd, project scientist and
commissioning manager, has moved from her native America to join the team.
"You have a fresh outlook on things in South Africa,"
she said. "The innovation that's coming out is incredible. They're not
limited by the way things have been done in the past."
"During apartheid, South Africans have to
pitch in and get on with things themselves. They are willing to change if they
get it wrong. When they make mistakes, they figure out how to solve them."
The project says it has created jobs for about a hundred
young scientists and engineers with skills in "next generation"
technologies. It has funded nearly 300 bursaries for astronomy, engineering and
physics students and says astronomy is now being taught in Botswana, Ghana,
Kenya, Mozambique, Madagascar, Mauritius and Zambia.
But in South Africa, where economic and
educational disparities persist between the white minority and black majority,
diversity is a hypersensitive issue. Dr Bernie Fanaroff, the country's SKA
project director, said: "If you look at astronomy around the world, it's
heavily dominated by middle aged white men. We've tried very hard to get women
and black astronomers and engineers into the programme.
"If you go to a number of European
countries, you'll see that the proportion of women in our programme is much
higher, so we're doing quite well. It's been quite difficult to get black
astronomers and engineers. Some of the technologies that we're dealing with are
technologies that black students haven't gone into — things like digital signal
processing."
Fanaroff added: "We've been finding young
people and bringing them into our training programmes as far as we can. We
haven't gone nearly far enough, but if you look at our bursary programme for
instance, more than half the bursaries and grants have gone to black students,
and I think it's about 40% have gone to women." Next, KAT-7 will grow into
MeerKAT, a £130m radio telescope with 64 dishes that will rival the current
world leader, the Very Large Array in New Mexico. But even MeerKAT, due to be
completed by 2016-17, is a mere "baby step" towards the SKA.
This will cost £1.3bn to build and about £130m a
year to operate. Construction will start in 2016 and take eight years, funded
by a UK-based consortium likely to be made up of 16 countries. They will choose
next year between Africa and Australia.
If Africa wins, around 3,000 dishes will be
spread across more than 3,000km in South Africa and its partners. Fanaroff
said: "It's changing the way South Africa is seen, not just as yet another
African country which is a basket case but actually as a science and technology
leader.
"A lot of African countries are now recognizing the importance of science and technology in development. Africa has
not been perceived up to now as a place where you do science and technology,
but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be in the future.
"People are talking about Africa as the next
great business destination. You've probably seen the McKinsey report about the
African lions, which makes the point that it's not only in resource extraction,
it's also in manufacturing and so on. We want to take that further into hi-tech
now.
"I would like South Africa in particular,
but Africa in general, to be seen as a place where you can do world class
science and technology."
At a presentation in London earlier this year,
Fanaroff floated an inevitable question: "We have immediate priorities
like housing, poverty, education, transport, so why would we spend money on
astronomy?"
MeerKAT project manager Willem Esterhuyse has at
least one answer.
"You can say we're going to cater to basic
needs and be a third world country, or you can push technology and be there
with the best," he said.
"The World Cup showed we're a country on the
way up, a country that can do things. You need to inspire innovators and teach
people hard skills so they can develop things that sell and create jobs. There
are a lot of potential spin-offs from what we do."
Size matters
"To observe the most distant and ancient
objects in the cosmos, scientists turn to telescopes of staggering proportions.
The reason is simple: in astronomy, size matters.
Larger telescopes can collect more light (and
other forms of electromagnetic radiation) than smaller ones. In doing so, they
can see fainter objects that are farther away, such as stars that formed
earlier in the life of the universe.
The Square Kilometer Array (SKA) will gather
radiowaves instead of visible light, giving it advantages over traditional
optical telescopes. Radiotelescopes can see through inclement weather, operate
in daylight hours and are less troubled by cosmic dust. They can pick up
radiowaves from cold hydrogen atoms that are ubiquitous in space, allowing
astronomers to map the heavens in a radically different way.
These advantages come at a price. Just as optical
telescopes can be blinded by the sun and artificial lighting, radiotelescopes
are best built in remote locations, far from sources of radiowaves, such as
mobile phone base stations.
The largest radiotelescope in operation, near
Arecibo in Puerto Rico, collects radiowaves over an area of 73,000 square
metres, and has a long list of discoveries to its name. Using the telescope,
astronomers spotted the first planets outside our solar system, confirmed
Einstein's theory of general relativity and measured the rotation of Mercury.
The SKA will have a collecting area of one
million square metres, making it 50 times more sensitive than any other
telescope. With it, astronomers hope to see as far back as the cosmic
"dark ages", the period before the first stars blinked into being.
Others will study how the first black holes formed, look for signs of alien
life, and possibly unravel the mystery of the dark energy that drives the
expansion of the universe.
Instead of one giant telescope dish, the SKA will
use 3,000 smaller dishes, each around 15m-wide, spread out over thousands of
kilometres. These will collect high frequency radiowaves, while two other kinds
of receptors, will pick up medium and low frequency waves. The signals from all
of the receivers are combined and sent along a fibre optic cable to a high
performance computer for processing.
Originally published in The Guardian UK (1&3) and RT News (2)
Originally published in The Guardian UK (1&3) and RT News (2)
No comments :
Post a Comment