Slashdot Mirror


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.

1 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Now THAT is cool to know... apk by meglon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... If you want to see something mind blowing, watch that. The accent might be a bit difficult at times (obviously depending on what you're used to normally), but it's 17 minutes you'll want to spend doing the same thing over again. A couple minutes in it changes format a little and really puts us in our place.

    --
    Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's