Reaching for the stars

OUTSIDE of the scientific community, it is fair to say that the significance of the MeerKAT radio telescope that has been built about 90km from the small town of Carnarvon in the Northern Cape is fully appreciated.

The MeerKAT is the core of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) which is also taking shape at the same site.

The SKA is an international enterprise to build the largest and most sensitive radio telescope globally.

Its infrastructure will be located in Africa and Australia.

Built at a cost of R4.4 billion, MeerKAT will be incorporated into the complex SKA instrument, which when fully operational in the late 2020s would be the world’s biggest and most powerful radio telescope.

The MeerKAT was inaugurated in a ceremony officiated by Deputy President David Mabuza and attended by renowned astrophysicists and other scientists.

Mabuza reminded the world that the MeerKAT radio telescope, covering an area of about 1km², would unlock development in science and technology.

It would also place this country among the leaders in the quest to understand everything from dark energy to finding alien life.

Fernando Camilo, chief scientist at the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory which built and operates the telescope, says: “MeerKAT will address some of the key science questions in modern astrophysics, such as how did galaxies form, how are they evolving, how did we come to be here… and for those purposes MeerKAT is the best in the world.”

The MeerKAT radio telescope comprises 64 antennas, each about 13.5m in diameter, located on baselines of up to 8km.

The vast amounts of data from the 64 dishes are processed at speeds of up to 275Gb/s in real time by a “correlator”.

Scientists say the SKA will feature up to 3 000 dishes co-hosted in Africa and Australia 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 quality of the Hubble Space telescope.

To whet appetites and to prove MeerKAT’s capabilities, Camilo released new images taken by the telescope of the region surrounding the gigantic black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy, some 25 000 light years away.

MeerKAT will answer questions that have puzzled humanity since time immemorial.

This is an exceptional achievement that will add immensely to the field of astronomy and will help answer questions that have puzzled humankind for many years.