South Africa's MeerKAT to help unlock mysteries of universe

CARNARVON, South Africa (Reuters) – A scientific mega-project to unlock cosmic conundrums from dark energy to detecting extraterrestrial life was given a boost on Friday, when the 64-dish MeerKAT radio telescope was inaugurated in the remote South African town of Carnarvon.

Built at a cost of 4.4 trillion rand, MeerKAT will be incorporated into the complex Square Kilometer Array (SKA) instrument, which when fully operational in the late 2020s would be the world's biggest and most powerful radio telescope.

Up to 3,000 dishes co-hosted in Africa and Australia will be able to scan the sky. of SKA.

"MeerKAT will address some of the key science questions in modern astrophysics – how did galaxies form, how are they evolving, how did we come here? MeerKAT is the best in the world, "said Fernando Camilo, chief scientist at the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory which built and operates the telescope.

At an inauguration, Camilo released new images taken by MeerKAT of the region surrounding the supermbadive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, some 25,000 light years away.

"We did not expect to use our telescope so early in the game, it's not even optimized, but to turn it to the center of the galaxy and get these stunning images, the best in the world, so you "Let's do something right, better than right," he told Reuters.

MeerKAT is a followup to the KAT 7 (Karoo Array Telescope), built in the vast semi-desert Karoo region north of Cape Town to demonstrate South Africa's ability to host the SKA. Afrikaans "meer" means "more", as in "more KAT", but it also refers to the small mammal native to the Karoo and famed for status on its hind legs to view the world.

Besides ground-breaking astronomy research, MeerKAT is also pushing boundaries in big data and high-performance computing with the likes of IBM ( IBM.N ) fed from each individual antenna to buried supercomputers underground to limit radio interference.

The biggest radio telescope of its kind in the southern hemisphere, MeerKAT looks like a cluster of eggs when you first see it on an hour's drive outside Carnarvon.

But up close, each one of them is almost as big as a storey building, rotating on a fixed distance as it scans the sky. Chosen because of its remoteness, with hills providing an extra shield against radio interference, the project is based on Kenya and Ghana.

"The first phase of SKA 1 in South Africa is to add 133 antennas to that (of MeerKAT)," said Rob Adam, an SKA international board member.

The expansion is expected to start next year, said Adam, with the first prototype built in China in North Cape province. MeerKAT will operate independently before being incorporated into SKA 1 sometime around 2023, Adam said.