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You look at the center of our galactic house, the Milky Way, pictured by 64 radio telescopes in the South African desert.
Scientists published this image today to inaugurate the MeerKAT radio telescope. But these scopes are part of an even more ambitious project: The Kilometer Square Array, a joint effort to build the world's largest telescope, covering the continents of Africa and Australia.
This image shows particle filaments, structures that seem to exist in alignment with the central black hole of the galaxy.
It is not known what causes these filaments. Perhaps they are particles ejected by the black hole that turns; maybe they're supposed to be "cosmic strings"; and maybe they're not unique, and there are other similar structures waiting to be found, according to a Harvard-Smithsonian publication Center for Astrophysics in 2017.
"This image of MeerKAT is great for me because the fine filaments in the radio image are excellent tracers of the galactic magnetic field, something we do not see in most optical and infrared data," Erin Ryan, Principal Investigator at the SETI Institute, Gizmodo .
"High resolution data like this one will help study galactic magnetic fields and their importance to the Evolution of Galaxies. "
Each of MeerKAT's 64 radio receivers is a 13.5-meter radio antenna that collects radio waves from cosmic sources (such as the center of the galaxy) with a timestamp. convert to digital information and sending at a central location. The information of each dish is then correlated in an image.
Imagine how a regular telescope works – light is collected by mirrors and concentrated in the center. In this case, it is as if each of the radio telescopes is itself a mirror, and the "center" is where the fiber optic cables meet to create the main image.
Ultimately, MeerKAT will be part of the largest network of square kilometers. (SKA), named because it will have a square kilometer of collection area, potentially with a higher resolution than the Hubble Space Telescope in the radio band. By the end of the 2020s, it should include 2000 radio antennas in the Karoo region of South Africa and Murchison Shire in Western Australia, and the total project could consist of 3000 dishes in other African countries, reports # 39; AFP . ] News24 .
News24 reports that MeerKAT alone costs 4.4 billion rand (447.4 million dollars), while the total cost of SKA has not yet been determined.
Such a telescope could have several important uses: Perhaps he could measure the history of the expansion of the universe to help understand the mysterious and dark energy. It could also offer insights into the gravity laws at the largest scales in the universe, and more generally see details of our galaxy and the universe that are invisible to other telescopes.
There are many cosmic mysteries to solve. And some of the answers can come from a huge variety of dishes in South Africa and Australia.
[MeerKAT, News24]
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