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IPFS News Link • Space Travel and Exploration

World's Most Powerful Radio Telescope Discovers 1300 New Galaxies in Trial Run

• motherboard.vice.com

The initial results were incredibly promising: operating with only one quarter of the 64 dishes that will eventually comprise MeerKAT, the telescope was able to find 1300 galaxies in a small corner of the universe where only 70 galaxies were known to exist previously.

MeerKAT, which is located roughly 350 miles north of Cape Town, is something of a proof of concept for the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) which is slated to come online in the 2020s. When the 3000 dishes that comprise SKA go live they will comprise the most sensitive radio telescope in the world, but for now this illustrious title will be claimed by MeerKAT, whose 64 dishes will be incorporated into the SKA array when they're finished next year.

Even operating with only a quarter of its eventual 64 dishes, MeerKAT's Saturday evening trial run established the radio telescope as the most powerful in the southern hemisphere according to SKA's chief scientist Fernando Camilo.


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