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A vast scientific project aimed at deciphering the cosmic mysteries, from dark matter to extraterrestrial life, entered a new stage on Friday with the inauguration of the MeerKAT radiotelephone – which has 64 antennas – near Carnarvon, a Isolated locality in South Africa,
Built with a budget of 4.4 billion US dollars (330 million dollars), MeerKAT will be incorporated into the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) which, when it becomes fully functional by the end of the 2020s, will be the largest and most powerful radiotelephone in the world.
Next, approximately 3000 antennas hosted by Africa and Australia will be able to search the sky 10 000 times faster and more precisely 50 times more than any other telescope. In addition, SKA will produce images that will exceed the quality of resolution provided by the Hubble Space Telescope, according to scientists.
"MeerKAT will explore some of the key issues of modern astrophysics – how galaxies have formed, how they have evolved," said Fernando Camilo, chief scientist at the South African Observatory of radioastronomy, which built and will operate the new telescope system
At the inauguration ceremony attended by representatives of the government and foreign dignitaries, Fernando Camilo published photographs of MeerKAT showing the celestial areas around the huge black holes in the center of the Milky Way, about 25,000 "We were not expecting to use our telescope so quickly, it was not even optimized yet, but its focus for the center of our galaxy and get these superb images, the best in the world, tells us that we have done the right thing, maybe even more, "adds the same researcher
MeerKAT is a sequel to e KAT 7 The Karoo Array telescope, built in the semi-karst region of Karoo, north of Cape Town, to demonstrate that South Africa has the capacity to host the SKA project. His name is a play on words: in the Afrikaans dialect, "meer" means "plus" (and so the expression "multiple KAT" is obtained), but it also refers to a small mammoth native to Karoo and famous In addition to this groundbreaking research in astronomy, MeerKAT will also help overcome the limitations of high-capacity databases and high-performance computers, such as those produced by IBM, involved in the development of systems capable of managing applications. huge amounts of data transmitted by each individual antenna to supercomputers buried at great depths in the ground to limit radio interference
MeerKAT, the largest radiotelephone of this type integrated in the southern hemisphere, looks like an egg full of eggs, an hour away from Carnarvon
the antenna itself is almost as high as a three-story building, rotating on a fixed axis as it watch the sky. Selected because of its isolation with hills providing an additional shield against radio interference, the site of this project is the main base in Africa for hundreds of antennas that will be placed in the final phase in others. countries including Kenya and Ghana
The MeerKAT radiotelephone will operate independently before being incorporated into the SKA system 1 around 2023.
Source: agerpres.ro
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