Project aiming to unlock secrets of the universe
SOME of UKZN’S brightest minds have come together to unlock some of the universe’s greatest mysteries with the launch of a massive radio telescope yesterday.
It may sound like something out of the show Big Bang Theory, but these experts are hopeful that the multimillion-rand project will reap real rewards.
Yesterday, Science and Technology Minister Mmamoloko Kubayingubane officially launched the Hydrogen Intensity and Real Time Analysis experiment (HIRAX) telescope that’s being put together by the University of Kwazulu-natal (UKZN) and its partners.
To be located at the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) South Africa core site in the Karoo, the HIRAX telescope will have important synergies with the 64-dish MEERKAT, the country’s precursor to SKA, which is an international effort to build the world’s largest radio telescope.
HIRAX will be a compact radio telescope array of 1024 6m-dishes and, in the four years that it will operate, is expected to deliver key data on the characteristics of “dark matter” and the causes of a phenomenon known as fast radio bursts in the universe when it scans a third of the sky.
“We are building the telescopes, with completion of the dishes expected in 2021,” said Professor Kavilan Moodley of UKZN’S Astrophysics and Cosmology Research Unit.
Eight prototypes of the dishes have been installed at the Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory (HARTRAO), just outside Johannesburg, and this will be upgraded to 128 telescopes by the end of next year at the Karoo site.
The phased approach for building the telescopes, said Moodley, was to allow for testing of the equipment.
UKZN is managing the R70million project, with more than a dozen experts at the university, including postgraduate students, postdoctorate fellows, undergraduate students and academic staff involved, and the skills required cover everything from astronomy, instrumentation, physics, astrophysics, mathematics and statistics to mechanical and electrical engineering.
Once the data is collected and analysed, the team will interpret it.
Local suppliers, said Moodley, would benefit, as the team aims to ensure that much of the work would be done locally.
There are several aims of the project, said Moodley, but the main goal was to understand “dark energy”.
“It’s very unusual in nature and makes up 70% of energy in the universe… We will be using what we call a cosmic ruler and hydrogen gas to track how dark energy changes. We will also be looking for fast radio bursts, which last a thousandth of a second. These are very brief and very bright,” he said.
The systems are so advanced that the data collected by the antenna and transferred to a computer in