When radio telescopes from all across the world collaborate, the universe’s finest images are produced. Together with South Africa’s MeerKAT, the most potent radio telescope in the southern hemisphere, the world’s largest network of radio telescopes, EVN, has made its first observation. The pictures of a far-off black hole jet create new opportunities for global collaboration and cosmic discovery.
The 64 satellite dishes that make up South Africa’s massive radio telescope MeerKAT are spaced up to 8 kilometers over the Karoo region and have a diameter of 13.5 meters apiece. Inaugurated in 2018, MeerKAT is a national facility under the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa, constructed and run by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO).
The most sensitive radio telescope network in the world, EVN uses technology for very long-baseline interferometry, or VLBI. With coordinated observations across up to 9,000 kilometers, numerous separate antennas function as an Earth-sized telescope. The technology makes it possible to image radio waves in the universe with previously unheard-of resolution.
Thanks to a partnership between astronomers at the European Joint Institute for VLBI ERIC (JIVE), located in the Netherlands, and SARAO in South Africa, MeerKAT has now made its debut in the EVN network.
Together with numerous other telescopes, such as the 25-meter telescope at the Onsala Space Observatory in Sweden, the researchers pointed MeerKAT toward a galaxy located far out in the cosmos. A torrent of intense plasma released by a supermassive black hole is responsible for the brightness of the galaxy J0123+3044.
The final photographs show how MeerKAT’s exceptional sensitivity greatly improves both the resolution and sensitivity of observations across very vast distances, in addition to being a technological accomplishment.
“MeerKAT’s 64 antennas have the same sensitivity as a 100-meter-diameter single dish antenna. This greatly enhances the image quality. “This is a significant advancement for upcoming observations using the SKA Observatory’s telescopes,” says Jun Yang, an astronomer at the Onsala Space Observatory in Chalmers.
The two telescopes that comprise the SKA Observatory, SKA-Low in Australia and SKA-Mid in South Africa, are now being constructed by astronomers worldwide.
Sweden is on the verge of joining the SKA Observatory, a multinational partnership that constructs and runs cutting-edge radio telescopes in South Africa and Australia. The SKA project’s precursor telescopes are EVN and MeerKAT.
Connecting the SKA-Mid telescope to other telescopes worldwide, as has been done with MeerKAT, is one of the scientific objectives of the SKA Observatory.
Together with individual radio telescopes in China, Germany, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland, South Korea, Spain, Sweden (the 25-meter telescope in Onsala), South Africa’s Hartebeesthoek Radio Observatory, and the e-Merlin network in the United Kingdom, the new observations were made using MeerKAT in South Africa.
