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By Wendell Roelf
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 most powerful radio telescope.
Up to 3,000 dishes co-hosted in Africa and Australia will be able to scan the sky more than 50 times the sensitivity of any other telescope and produce images Space telescope, scientists said 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? … and for those purposes MeerKAT is the best in the world, "said Fernando Camilo, chief scientist at the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory which built and operated the telescope.
At an inauguration attended by government officials and foreign dignitaries, Camilo released new images taken by MeerKAT of the region surrounding the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy Milky Way, some 25,000 light years away.
"We did not expect to use our telescope so early in the game, it's "he told Reuters."
MeerKAT is a great success story in the world. 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 radio frequency 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
as high as a three storey building, rotating on a fixed pedestal as it scans the sky. Chosen because of its remoteness, with hills providing an extra shield against radio interference, the project site is the main African base for hundreds of antennas that will be located in 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. about 450 kilometers north of Cape Town in the Northern Cape province. MeerKAT will operate independently before being incorporated into SKA 1 sometime around 2023, Adam said.
(Reporting by Wendell Roelf; Editing by Peter Graff)
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