South Africa Deputy President David Mabuza on Friday officially inaugurated the 64-dish MeerKAT telescope at a ceremony near Carnarvon.
MeerKAT
The MeerKAT will form part of the larger Square Kilometer Array. It will have a square kilometer of collecting area, and will potentially have higher resolution than NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in the radio band.
Fernando Camilo, South African Radio Astronomy Observatory chief scientist, said that the telescope will address some key question in modern astrophysics, which includes how galaxies form and how they evolve.
Region Surrounding Milky Way's Central Black Hole
The radio telescope, which was built and operated by SARAO already started to make science operation.
During the inauguration attended by government officials and foreign dignitaries, Camilo presented a panorama obtained by the telescope, which shows the extraordinary details in the regions that surround the supermassive black hole lying at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
"We didn't expect to use our telescope so early in the game, it's not even optimized, but to turn it to the centre of the galaxy and obtain these stunning images, the best in the world, tells you you've done something right, better than right," Camilo said.
Filaments Of Particles
The image features filaments of particles that appear to exist in alignment with the central black hole of our galaxy albeit it is not clear what is behind these filaments. These filaments were discovered by the Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico in the 1980s but astronomers have yet to unveil its origin.
Astronomers think they could be particles ejected by the spinning black hole, or the hypothesized cosmic strings, or something not entirely unique.
Galactic Magnetic Field
Erin Ryan, from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, described the image as awesome because the fine filaments in the radio image serve as excellent tracers of the galactic magnetic field, which astronomers do not often see in optical and infrared data.
Ryan said that high-resolution data such as this may help in the study of the galactic magnetic field and their role in the evolution of galaxies.
"The MeerKAT image has such clarity," said Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, from Northwestern University, an expert on filamentary structures found in the central black hole but nowhere else in our galaxy.
"It shows so many features never before seen, including compact sources associated with some of the filaments, that it could provide the key to cracking the code and solve this three-decade riddle."
