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A science mega-project to unlock cosmic enigmas of dark energy to the detection of extraterrestrial life received a boost on Friday when the telescope at 64 MeerKAT antennas was inaugurated in the remote town of Carnarvon in South Africa. MeerKAT will be integrated with the complex Square Kilometer Array instrument (SKA), which, once fully operational in the late 2020s, will be 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 Hubble Space Telescope resolution. "MeerKAT will address some of the key scientific questions of modern astrophysics – how did the galaxies form, how do they evolve, how did we come here … and for these purposes, MeerKAT is the best ", said Fernando Camilo, chief scientist of the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory who built and operates the telescope.
At an inauguration ceremony, Camilo published new images taken by MeerKAT from the area surrounding the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way, some 25,000 light-years away
"We did not expect to use our telescope so early in the game, so we did not have to do it. is not even optimized, but Rendez-vous in the center of the galaxy and get these amazing images, the best in the world, tells you that you have done something good, better than just, "he told Reuters. 19659003] MeerKAT follows the KAT 7 (Karoo Array Tele scope), built in 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 "plus", 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 groundbreaking research in astronomy, MeerKAT is pushing the boundaries of big data and high performance computing, helping IBM to develop systems capable of handling the staggering amount of data transmitted by each antenna to buried supercomputers underground.
The largest radio telescope of this type in the southern hemisphere, MeerKAT looks like a cluster of eggs when you see it for the first time an hour away from Carnarvon
. as high as a three-story building, turning on a fixed 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 up to Kenya and South Africa. in 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 the SKA International Board of Directors.
The expansion is expected to begin next year, said Adam, with the first prototype built in China at the site about 450 kilometers north of Cape Town in the Northern Cape Province. MeerKAT will work independently before being incorporated into SKA 1 around 2023.
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