Kimberley - The discovery of a galaxy five billion light years away, by a Square Kilometre Array (SKA) pathfinder telescope, is proving that the SKA telescope, part of which is currently under construction in the Northern Cape, will be able to do what no other telescope on earth can do - crack open a window to little-explored periods of the universe’s history.
The galaxy was uncovered in radio emission travelling to Earth using the Australian SKA Pathfinder telescope (ASKAP), located at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) in Western Australia.
The MRO is located in a remote part of Western Australia and was chosen as one of two ideal radio-quiet sites to develop the SKA telescope, the other being located near Sutherland in the Northern Cape.
SKA will be the world’s largest radio telescope when built.
The five-billion-year-old radio emission was stamped with the “imprint” of hydrogen gas it had travelled through on its way to Earth, according to Dr James Allison, who led the research team.
“The gas absorbs some of the emission, creating a tiny dip in the signal. At many observatories, this dip would have been hidden by background radio noise, but our site is so radio quiet it stood out clearly. This allowed us to crack open a window to a little-explored period of the universe’s history,” Allison said.
Researchers will use the absorption technique with ASKAP to find hundreds of galaxies that are up to ten billion light years away.
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