These questions could be answered sooner than we think with the 64 dish MeerKAT, the world’s largest radio telescope of its kind, which was unveiled in the Karoo last week.
Built at a cost of R4.4bn, the MeerKAT forms part of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) which, when fully operational in the 2020s, will be the first of its kind and the world’s biggest and most powerful radio telescope.
Up to 3000 dishes co-hosted in Africa and Australia will then be able to scan the sky 10000 times faster, with 50 times the sensitivity of any other telescope and produce images that exceed the resolution quality of the Hubble Space telescope, scientists said of SKA.
The head of the Astrophysics and Cosmology Research Unit at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Professor Sunil Maharaj, said SKA would be done in phases - SKA1, 2 and 3. “One is now virtually complete (MeerKAT). So the next phase is SKA2. This means we have telescopes which are already gathering data which is being analysed by scientists,†Maharaj said
He said through MeerKAT, we would be able to learn more about the key questions in science, such as the behaviour of stars, and their composition.
The radio telescopes from which high quality data could be extracted operate at a frequency that is at a level not audible to us as humans.
He said the vision was to build hundreds of telescopes across the square kilometre and to get them to collaborate.
“And synchronise so that information comes in via these telescopes, and the effect of it is that we collect this information not from just one telescope but hundreds of them, so that we are getting 100 times this information,†he said.
On the question of the Big Bang, he said: “Because the information that we have about the expansion of the universe is quite basic, we don’t know if the universe is expanding faster or more slowly. There’s some evidence called dark energy - dark energy is when you look at a supernova which is an exploding star.
“The description is that these objects are moving away from us more slowly, so the universe is slowing down.
“But new information coming through at the moment is that when you look at the spectra of the supernova they are moving faster away from us, so evidence is that the universe is at an expanding phase.â€
At the unveiling yesterday, attended by government officials and foreign dignitaries, Fernando Camilo, the chief scientist at the SA Radio Astronomy Observatory, released new images taken by MeerKAT of the region surrounding the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy, some 25000 light years away.
“We didn’t expect to use our telescope so early in the game, it’s not even optimised, but to turn it to the centre of the galaxy and obtain these stunning images, the best in the world, tells you you’ve done something right, better than right,†said Camilo.
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