Cape Town - The KAT-7 radio telescope that is a technology demonstrator for the massive Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project to follow over the next decade and more, is now a fully operational scientific instrument in its own right.
And the first significant scientific results from its use have appeared in astronomical research literature.
This comes just a year after South Africa and its eight African partners were selected to host more than 70 percent of the international SKA project that will be by far the largest radio telescope built yet and powerful enough to pick up radio signals that were generated close to the very beginning of time some 13.75 billion years ago.
The seven-dish KAT-7 test array was built at the site near Carnarvon in the Great Karoo that will also host the much bigger 64-dish MeerKAT that South Africa is about to start constructing.
MeerKAT will be the largest and most sensitive radio telescope in the southern hemisphere, until it is in turn incorporated into phase one of the 3 000-dish SKA instrument. SKA1, as it’s being called, should be fully scientifically operational by about 2021, and will constitute about 10 percent of the full SKA2.
On Thursday, SKA South Africa director Professor Bernie Fanaroff said completion of SKA2 would “almost certainly” depend on the successful completion of SKA1 and on the availability of funds.
He was speaking at a two-day “Astronomy town meeting” at the National Research Foundation’s iThemba laboratories at Faure, which has drawn astronomers from all over the country and from many international institutions.
Fanaroff said KAT-7 was “now a fully operational scientific instrument”, while the infrastructure for MeerKAT was almost complete. MeerKAT’s first antenna would be erected in February, the second a month later, and its full 64-dish array would be rolled out by the end of 2016.
In a paper in the latest issue of the South African Journal of Science, astronomers from UCT, the University of Southampton and SKA South Africa project point out that KAT-7 is a “modest” radio telescope compared to MeerKAT and the SKA, in terms of resolution and sensitivity.
However, two papers based on data sourced from observations with this telescope have now been published.
The first, in which the KAT-7 array was used with the 26m Hartebeesthoek radio astronomy observatory (HartRAO) in Gauteng, is a study of the energetic outflow of matter from Circinus X-1, an accreting neutron star.
The second paper reported 120 hours of observations of the nearby galaxy NGC 3109 which allowed researchers to model the dark matter distribution in this galaxy.
Dark matter is the as-yet undiscovered material that accounts for a large part of the mass of the universe. Astronomers infer its existence from gravitational effects but don’t know what it is. - Cape Argus
* If you use Gmail to read IOL's newsletters, note that Google is rolling out a new tabbed inbox that filters your mail into 5 separate tabs - Primary, Social, Promotions, Updates and Forums. IOL emails will probably be sent to the “Promotions” tab instead of the “Primary” tab. If you don't want it that way, drag the newsletter from the Promotions tab to the Primary tab. An alert will pop up. Click “yes” and your newsletters will continue to go to your Primary inbox.