Durban - Sinenhlanhla Sikhosana planned to study medicine before a science teacher changed her life by encouraging her to visit the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s astrophysics and cosmology department.
One “mind blowing” video clip and lecture about how a star was born later, and she knew “this was it”.
Now, the 20-year-old BSc graduate is enrolled in the Square Kilometre Array school, which is training a new generation of astronomers to work with the data from the world’s largest and most powerful telescope.
She is one of 40 students from around South Africa who have converged on the university this week, to be taught by astronomers from France, India, Canada and the US.
Sikhosana, a former Durban Girls’ Secondary pupil, applied to the SKA school to be trained in programming.
“I want to understand how the universe works, to be able to take data from the SKA telescope and try to understand the dark matter and dark energy that makes the universe.”
Fellow SKA school student Heather Prince, 22, is working toward her Master’s degree in radio astronomy.
The former Pietermaritzburg Girls’ High pupil had psychology, anthropology or linguistics in mind before changing her focus and graduating from Rhodes University with a BSc.
Addressing the workshop, Professor Kavilan Moodley of UKZN’s Astrophysics and Cosmology Research Unit, said the workshop was about training the people who were going to use the “monster” telescope.
“They are young bright people who will be the future of South African astronomy. The science, basically, is what excites us. We want to study the first stars and galaxies that formed in the universe; we want to test Einstein’s theory of general relativity; we want to search for life out there and we want to learn about this mysterious dark energy,” Moodley said.
“There are a lot of other aspects to the SKA. It will have a huge impact on the economy. The SKA will produce enough data each day for 15 million (64 gig) iPods and have the processing power of a million desktop computers.”
Construction on the telescope in South Africa and Australia is expected to be completed in 2025. - The Mercury