MeerKAT of South Africa to help unlock the mysteries of the universe

Built at a cost of 4.4 billion rand, MeerKAT will be incorporated into the complex Square Kilometer Array instrument (SKA), which, when it will be fully operational in the late 2020s, will the largest and most powerful radio telescope in the world. Up to 3,000 dishes co-hosted in Africa and Australia will be able to scan the sky 10,000 times faster with 50 times the sensitivity of any other telescope and produce images that exceed the resolution Hubble Space Telescope. from SKA.

"MeerKAT will address some of the key scientific questions of modern astrophysics – how did galaxies form, how do they evolve, how did we come here … and for these purposes, MeerKAT is the the world's best, "said Fernando Camilo, chief scientist at the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory, which built and operates the telescope.

At an inauguration attended by government officials and foreign dignitaries, Camilo published new images taken by MeerKAT of the area surrounding the supermbadive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, some 25,000 years ago -light.

"We were not expecting to use our telescope as early in the game, it's not even optimized, but to turn it to the center of the galaxy and get those amazing images, the best in the world, you says "I did something good, better than good," he told Reuters.

MeerKAT follows the KAT 7 (Karoo Array Telescope), built in the the vast semi-desert region of Karoo, north of Cape Town, to demonstrate South Africa's ability to host the SKA.His name is a play on words: in Afrikaans, "meer" means "more", as in "more KAT", but it also refers to the small mammal native of Karoo and famous for his hind legs to see the world.

In addition to revolutionary astronomical research, MeerKAT pushes the boundaries of big data and the 39, high-performance computing with IBM that helps develop systems capable of managing quantity vertiginous data transmitted by each antenna to supercomputers buried deep. limit radio interference.

The largest radio telescope of its kind in the southern hemisphere, MeerKAT looks like a bunch of eggs when seen for the first time an hour away from Carnarvon.

But up close, each sensitive dish is almost as high as a three-story building, turning on a stationary pedestal while it sweeps the sky. Chosen because of its remoteness, with hills providing an additional shield against radio interference, the project site is the main African base for hundreds of antennas that will eventually be placed as far as Kenya and the Middle East. Ghana.

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

The expansion is expected to begin next year, Adam said, with the first prototype of a Chinese-built dish already on the site about 450 kilometers north of Cape Town in North Cape Province. MeerKAT will work independently before being incorporated into SKA 1 around 2023, said Adam.

(Report by Wendell Roelf, edited by Peter Graff)