Galaxy Harvest?? From South African Radio Telescope.

[barkis]

This report came from a Yahoo News Site, so guarantee of accuracy might be a bit presumptuous.

Barkis

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"South Africa's new MeerKAT radio telescope has found 1,300 galaxies in a tiny corner of the universe where only 70 were known to before.

The first image was produced by MeerKAT, which is based nearly 400 miles north of Cape Town, despite only 16 of the site's 64 planned dishes being activated.

When all the receptors are working it will form part of the multi-national Square Kilometre Array (SKA) , which will become the world's most powerful radio telescope.

Fernando Camilo of SKA said even at current capacity MeerKAT "is already the best radio telescope in the southern hemisphere".

When SKA is up-and-running in the 2020s there will be 3,000 dishes across several countries peering deep into space.

The image produced on Saturday shows less than 0.01 percent of the entire celestial sphere.

SKA will have a discovery potential 10,000 times greater than the most advanced modern instruments and will explore exploding stars, black holes, dark energy and traces of the universe's origins some 14 billion years ago.

MeerKAT will be one of the two main dish clusters for SKA, with the other in Australia.

South African Minister of Science and Technology Naledi Pandor said: "It's a first for us as Africa and also it's a first for the world because the world hasn't done this in Africa." 

"We are building a global infrastructure for the world."

 

[dph1nm]

I think strictly this means 1300 radio sources where only 70 radio sources were known before.

NigelM

[acey]

Here's the project media release, dated July 16:

http://www.ska.ac.za/media-releases/meerkat-joins-the-ranks-of-the-worlds-great-scientific-instruments-through-its-first-light-image/

[barkis]

On 7/27/2016 at 14:08, dph1nm said:

I think strictly this means 1300 radio sources where only 70 radio sources were known before.

NigelM

Then what are the Images of that they were talking about Nigel?.  I understand what you say,  but what would the reported imagery consist of?   I know little or nothing about  Radio Astronomy. 

[acey]

The images are in the media release I linked to

[barkis]

47 minutes ago, acey said:

The images are in the media release I linked to

Thanks Acey, I need to get my head around this branch of astronomy, but age is against me digesting it to any great degree .