By Ed Stoddard
Sutherland - Huge white domes make a jarring sight amid the landscape of South Africa's arid Karoo region.
Perched on a wind-swept hilltop, they house telescopes of different shapes and sizes that search the star-filled skies in this remote corner of the Earth for the secrets of the universe.
Those skies will soon be scanned by a super scope that will probe far deeper into space than any of its neighbours - the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT), which will be 12m in diameter.
"This is for deep space observation," said Hitesh Gajjar, an electrical engineer involved in the project, as he pointed with pride at SALT - a massive hexagon filled with 91 smaller mirrored hexagons, of which 18 are in place.
Continues Below ↓
SALT will enable scientists to view stars and galaxies a billion times too faint to be visible to the naked eye. The official website says that is as about as faint as a candle's flame on the moon.
SALT will also probe quasars, which resemble bright stars but are in fact black holes at the center of galaxies and which are some of the most distant objects in the universe.
The light reaching us now left them a long time ago and as a consequence we see them as they were billions of years ago when they were young.
"Very distant quasars give us information about earlier times in the history of the universe. One benefit is that this enables us to study the time evolution of the universe," said South African astronomer Chris Koen.
"We can also try to determine whether the same physical laws applied in the distant past because we see quasars as they were long ago," he said.
SALT will be the biggest telescope in the southern hemisphere - from where galaxies can be viewed which cannot be seen up north.
"You can see the Magellanic clouds from the southern hemisphere but not in the north," said Koen.
The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds orbit our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and are sufficiently close for detailed study. Some scientists believe they will eventually collide with the Milky Way and become part of our own galaxy.
"For extragalactic astronomy, the southern hemisphere is the place to be," said Koen.
|
StumbleUpon
Reddit
Digg
Delicious
Newsvine
Facebook
muti
Twitter
