Carlo Petersen
THE Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) spotted above the city at the weekend is more than likely a hoax, Southern African Large Telescope science data manager Steve Crawford said yesterday.
City revellers took to social media at the weekend, posting photographs to report a “UFO” high in the night sky. The hashtag #UFOSA trended on Twitter on Sunday after numerous people reported seeing “green orbs floating in the sky”.
Crawford said the reported sightings were “most likely a hoax”. “With so few pictures, and those are not very good, and without a further description… it is difficult to say what it was, but it is mostly reflections of the moon off the clouds as it (the moon) was nearly full, or the green colour could be associated with ionised gas in the upper atmosphere,” Crawford said.
Square Kilometre Array (SKA) SA – which operates the KAT-7 radio telescope – said the instrument did not record the sighting. SKA SA’s head of communication Lorenzo Raynard said KAT-7 operators would view images captured by the instrument to make a conclusive statement.
“If the KAT-7 instrument would be able to detect an anomaly, two distinct criteria need to be met for a radio telescope,” Raynard said.
“The instrument should be pointed in the direction of the entity – line of sight, and the emissions from the entity should fall within the frequency bands of KAT-7. With reference to the latter, KAT-7 is specifically designed to be sensitive to emissions such as burst emissions from pulsars and clouds of neutral hydrogen in galaxies.
“For this reason, the instrument has not recorded any data that can reference the sightings recorded.”
He said KAT-7 was not the first superior radio telescope, but SKA – which is currently being constructed and will include the KAT-7 and other telescopes – promised to be the most advanced radio telescope system ever built.