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The World's Most Powerful Telescope Just Discovered 1,230 New Galaxies (yahoo.com)
An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes a report from Vice:
On Saturday night astronomers at the South African MeerKAT radio telescope array fired up 16 of its recently completed dishes and released the first ever image from what is slated to become the world's most powerful radio telescope. The initial results were incredibly promising: operating with only one quarter of the 64 dishes that will eventually comprise MeerKAT, the telescope was able to find 1300 galaxies in a small corner of the universe where only 70 galaxies were known to exist previously.
Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes a report Agence France-Presse: MeerKAT's full contingent of 64 receptors will be integrated next year into a multi-nation Square Kilometer Array (SKA) which is is set to become the world's most powerful radio telescope. The images produced by MeerKAT "are far better that we could have expected," the chief scientist of the SKA in South Africa, Fernando Camilo said at the site of the dishes near the small town of Carnarvon, 600 kilometres north of Cape Town. When fully up and running in the 2020s, the SKA... will have a discovery potential 10,000 times greater than the most advanced modern instruments and will explore exploding stars, black holes, dark energy and traces of the universe's origins some 14 billion years ago.
Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes a report Agence France-Presse: MeerKAT's full contingent of 64 receptors will be integrated next year into a multi-nation Square Kilometer Array (SKA) which is is set to become the world's most powerful radio telescope. The images produced by MeerKAT "are far better that we could have expected," the chief scientist of the SKA in South Africa, Fernando Camilo said at the site of the dishes near the small town of Carnarvon, 600 kilometres north of Cape Town. When fully up and running in the 2020s, the SKA... will have a discovery potential 10,000 times greater than the most advanced modern instruments and will explore exploding stars, black holes, dark energy and traces of the universe's origins some 14 billion years ago.
If the images are that much better than expected then someone didn't do their math...
Now Twitter has to top that and build an array with 128 receptors.
Isn't this just stamp-collecting? We already have pictures of many many many galaxies. They are pictures of things hundreds of thousands of light years across. Is getting one more bunch of pixels all that amazing or useful?
"... the worldÃ(TM)s most powerful radio telescope..."
Yeah. That character encoding will get you every time. Maybe you should have hit 'preview'?
Look: I *know* character encoding is hard. But the simple ones -- curly quotes, en- and em-dashes, etc. -- are a SOLVED PROBLEM. A bunch of open-source rich-text editors solved this AGES ago. Maybe a DECADE ago by now. A few basics will save you in 99 cases out of 100.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
It's far far away.
Already KAT-7, the seven test radio telescopes that preceded this was sensitive enough to make new discoveries. And it's only going to get better from here, with the full SKA operational it'll be a new world for radio astronomy.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You can tell from the pixels this is fake
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
I bet their not "new".
I bet their pretty second hand and old.
A better headline would read.
Telescope spots previously uncharted galaxies..
But that would mean a blog or "journalist" being accurate and having some understanding of how to use the English language correctly..
All the photons doing the hard work of getting here to tell us these amazing stories about these galaxies, and now the telescopes get all the credit for it. How selfish of us.
Yup, almost every single one.
See subject: I actually looked up what you note in "the great attractor" & learned a new thing today thanks to you...
* Thanks!
APK
P.S.=> As the 'infamous they' say? "It's not a wasted day if you learn even 1 new thing that day" or something along those lines... apk
I'm glad to see these fruits of scientific labor advancing mankind in the midst of religion and feral humanity regressing it.
Let's see your calculations which merge cosmological theory with observations.
Because the 1% must be fed and clothed. Would you rather they be like the rest of us? Where is your understanding?
You literally have just enough information to be clearly wrong, and demonstrably so. Educate yourself a bit, then come back so I can deal with something a bit more concrete than just window licking and pants on head stupid.
Yet, still 0% discovered if we assume the universe is infinite. Anything divided by infinite equals 0.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
There is evidence of dark matter in our own Milky Way, there is ten times the matter than is accounted for by visible matter, and the distribution is roughly spherical not disk-shaped. the distribution of the rotational velocity of stars about the center can't be accounted for by visible matter either
Long long ago, in a galaxy far, far away...
Once upon a time (15+ years ago) this kind of topic would have garnered a lot of interesting discussion. Slowly but surely the posts have become less informed and more cynical. Now a topic like this just generates a raft of cynical stupidity. Not even sure why I come here anymore.
Little thing, but what an amazing name for a telescope. According to the site, it's 'more KAT' (the original name for the array), as well as, of course, the unbearably cute mammal that lives in the area. But that, along with the "standing up to look around" mission of the array itself makes me absolutely convinced that I live in a novel of some sort (most likely Dickens, who liked to name his characters with oddly appropriate names (I'm lookin' at you, Ms. Malaprop)).
1230 new galaxies. So that's about 100 thousand million stars in EACH galaxy? This is simply mind boggling.
And then they discovered that the lens cap was on and filled with dirt.
I'm an old and obnoxious astronomer so I'm going to make the obligatory complaint about the oxymoronic term "radio telescope". "Tele" refers to the visual spectrum of light, not radio. The MeerKAT is, in fact, a radio interferometer.
Please proceed to contradict and/or down vote this post. Your cooperation is assumed.
"The world's most powerful telescope just discovered 1230 new galaxies"
C'mon, they couldn't discover 4 more?
There is evidence of dark matter in our own Milky Way, there is ten times the matter than is accounted for by visible matter, and the distribution is roughly spherical not disk-shaped. the distribution of the rotational velocity of stars about the center can't be accounted for by visible matter either
#BlackMatterLives
These wavelengths are far too long to act like photons. Their wave-like properties completely dominate.
The real travesty here is the money wasted on your public education.
This is the same kind of racism and white privilege that says Columbus "discovered" America.
Look at the posting history. That poster is either a troll, or willfully wrong considering how often they have posted on similar topics and gotten massive amounts of comments pointing out what beginner level reading on the topic would convey.
You matter, until you multiply yourself by the speed of light squared. Then you energy.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
"I know this comment makes no sense, but neither does the rampant liberalism exhibited by most Astronomer types, so I consider it even."
You actually have a point. How did you ever get around to it, between kicking puppies to the curb after Breakfast, and eating Kittens for lunch, whole, and with Hot Sauce?
Science, all Science, has a "Liberal" bent. It's called "The Scientific Method". Create Models of how things work, change those Models as investigation continues, and throw out those Models in favor of newer Models when intellectually necessary.
This is the form of current Scientific Darwinian Thinking. And it works.
I am quite happy that your own internal and malignant vile will soon consume you, and you will shortly after this, just be fertilizer. And nobody will give a damn. You have contributed nothing, and nothing will be your legacy.
Go Astronomers!
And the control code to keep all those dishes synchronized (critical for arrays), and the code to analyze and combine the signals and... oh every other piece of code they have - is all written in Python.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
To be a bit more clear (and likely pedantic), there is observational evidence of matter moving in such a way that cannot be explained by the gravitational force alone. This observation is been made in our own galaxy, and can be mathematically accounted for by assuming a distribution of something that generates gravitational force (and the weak force) but doesn't otherwise exhibit any of the properties of what we currently think of as matter.
It seems that the scientific community has a love-fest with the gravitational force to the point they postulate the existence of something not observed to generate it. Direct and Indirect experiments have been proposed and/or done to detect this stuff, but no conclusive evidence seems forthcoming.
Shoot, there went the neighborhood!
http://www.ska.ac.za/releases/20160716.php shows a small patch of it and says that image "spans about the area of the Earth's moon". Assuming they meant to say the moon's diameter it would mean that the big image is approximately 3 degrees square.
It would be nice to know exactly where that patch of sky is though; to match it up with a visible image.
I disagree, "experiments" can include observations of the universe.
there are other evidences for dark matter, even in the CMB.
Love fest with gravitational force? It is the force that fits the observations
No. The gravitational force, along with an assumed distribution of something that hasn't been observed but must be common, can explain the motion.
I certainly agree that the observations are valid...but it seems to me (and yes, I'm an amateur that doesn't work in the field) that the solution was assumed and fit to the observations. The assumption of the solution (gravitational force) is the "love fest" part. This, to me, seems obvious as an outsider looking in.
I'm not even arguing against what's being proposed ("dark matter") as a potential solution, I'm just pointing out the bias as I see it: "Wow, look at that, I wonder what distribution of mass is generating that gravitational force to produce that motion?"
No. The gravitational force, along with an assumed distribution of something that hasn't been observed but must be common, can explain the motion.
that's the very definition of dark matter