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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.
Now Twitter has to top that and build an array with 128 receptors.
"... 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.
Maybe. We've learned that galaxies are often in clusters, and that many are moving either together or towards a single location known as "the great attractor." If we can figure out these new galaxies' red-shifts and motion, we might learn more about the structure of the universe and in turn learn more about dark matter, dark energy, and other mysteries.
Yeah, it's not as if we're discovering anything new anymore! Why on earth are people always wanting to push limits and go further!?
Waste of time when we could all just be playing Pokemon.
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
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.
You mean count the number of things we don't know exist? OK then, you give it a go.
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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.
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
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
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.
"Anything divided by infinite equals 0" -- Large correction: not necessarily. For example, using a non-standard model of the rational (or real) numbers:
(a) any positive finite non-zero number divided by a positive infinite number is a positive infinitesimal number, that is a number greater than 0 but smaller than any positive "standard" number;
(b) if n is a positive infinite number and N is a greater infinite number then N/n is greater than or equal to some finite positive standard number, and might be infinite.
Non-standard analysis
Surreal number - Slashot connection - Donald Knuth invented the name "Surreal number" (one construction of surreal numbers was invented by the mathematician John Horton Conway)
"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
They still existed even though we didn't know about them. Our knowledge of them may have been a probability, but they were always there, along with the countless others we know nothing about.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
Things are engineered to at least meet the specified requirements. Many times you do better than the requirements. You don't always know how much better until you actually test the thing. This is especially true when you're at the leading edge, doing things no one has done before.
As an example, a bridge is engineered to carry at least a certain load, but exactly how much weight will it really carry? You won't know exactly unless you test it to failure. Do you consider that to be a math failure too?
You come here because as bad as it is, it is far better than comment boards on general news sites and youtube. Though I agree, it is getting harder to tell the difference.
To be pedantic, not "tele" refers to the visual spectrum but "scope". Ancient Greek "tele" means "far" and "skopos" means "watcher". I have no problem with extending "watcher" to the non-visual part of the spectrum, it's closer than "listener" or othert terms related to human sense organs.
Dear Mr Old and Obnoxious astronomer, please take note that tele doesn't refer to the visible spectrum of light, nor does it refer to electromagnetic radiation. It is a prefix coming from the Greek word tele meaning far.
The second part of the word, scope, is derived from the Latin and Greek words scopium and skopein meaning to look at
So the combined word telescope means to look at far/distant, nothing more, nothing less, and that is why we have optical telescopes (for optical distant viewing), radio telescopes (for distant radio viewing) and so forth.
So while you are correct that MeerKAT is a radio interferometer, as is any observing system using multiple imagers, it is a telescope as it is looking at distant objects.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
You can tell from the pixels this is fake
Forget the pixels, look at the shadows! All over the place!
Wanna buy a shirt?
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You matter, until you multiply yourself by the speed of light squared. Then you energy.
Wanna buy a shirt?
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Yet, still 0% discovered if we assume the universe is infinite. Anything divided by infinite equals 0.
The space might be infinite but there are a finite number of things in it.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
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 *
Douglas Adams begs to differ.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Actually people on Earth should do well to stop pushing limits and learning instead to live within them. We wouldn't be in the environmental mess we're in now if we had grown up earlier and understood what our place is.
You are actually dead, did you know that? Quite dead. Brain-wise, social-wise and most importantly, intellectually you are dead. A zombie with a cell phone and no actual interest in life outside a safe-place and a cookie. You are bereft of any life-giving humanity. You sit alone behind a window and lookout disapprovingly while real life passes you by... everyday.
Don't forget 'confused by Greek' when describing yourself in the future :)
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.
The space might be infinite but there are a finite number of things in it
Douglas Adams begs to differ.
Probably
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Wut? So are you trying to apply an existential theory of galaxy discovery? Everything that exists in the universe now already exists, is going out of existence, no longer exists, or is about to exist. Our observance of these things is just that an observance. Just because we are seeing them for the first time doesn't mean they weren't there the whole time until we got a more powerful telescope and VIOLA!!! They popped into existence because of it. lulz.
Shoot, there went the neighborhood!
If you assume that, then I am sure that you have a good reason for making that assumption. What is your reason - or reasons?
I see no reason to make that assumption.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Please don't talk about things your humain brain can't understand and have a look at my signature.
Cheers and have a nice day! ;-)
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
I vote for the imaginary old bearded man in the sky
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