SOUTH AFRICA: South Africa on Thursday unveils the southern hemisphere's biggest telescope

Record ID: 460186

  • Title: SOUTH AFRICA: South Africa on Thursday unveils the southern hemisphere's biggest telescope
  • Date: 11th November 2005
  • Summary: (W3) SUTHERLAND, NORTHERN CAPE, SOUTH AFRICA (NOVEMBER 10, 2005) (REUTERS) SOUTH AFRICAN PRESIDENT THABO MBEKI VISITINGTHE SOUTHERN AFRICAN LARGE TELESCOPE (SALT) (3 SHOTS) AUDIENCE (SOUNDBITE) (English) PRESIDENT THABO MBEKI SAYING: "The great minds gathered here today to inaugurate the Southern Africa Large Telescope have the possibility to peer into ordinarily unimaginable vistas of time and space, to discover what the Universe was like, when the first stars and galaxies were formed. You will therefore not find it difficult to understand our excitement that even as we probe outer space from here, elsewhere in our country, the host of SALT, we also have the possibility to continue investigating what happened on the tiny planet we call Earth, relevant to the formation and evolution of plant, animal and human life as we have come to known." PEOPLE LISTENING (W3) SUTHERLAND, NORTHERN CAPE, SOUTH AFRICA (NOVEMBER 3, 2005) (REUTERS) SALT (SOUTHERN AFRICA LARGE TELESCOPE) (6 SHOTS) TELESCOPE INTERIOR (4 SHOTS) (GOOD SHOTS) (SOUNDBITE)(English) SALT PROJECT SCIENTIST, DAVID BUCKLEY, SAYING: "A telescope like this, this is the largest collecting area of a telescope in the Southern Hemisphere so that alone is telling you that we've got it in terms of real estate of mirrors to look at faint objects. We'll have this for many decades. They are talking about building a next generation of optical telescopes that are called extremely large telescopes or ELT." TELESCOPE (3 SHOTS) TELESCOPE AT SUNSET (GOOD SHOTS)
  • Embargoed: 26th November 2005 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: South Africa, South Africa
  • Country: South Africa
  • Topics: Science / Technology
  • Reuters ID: LVADUQZ9YWGPCZWR1SUD352ACIOI
  • Story Text: South Africa on Thursday (November 10) unveiled the southern hemisphere's biggest telescope, intended to catch glimpses of the early universe and shed light on how it turned from "smooth" to "clumpy".
    The Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) will enable scientists to view stars and galaxies a billion times too faint to be visible to the naked eye -- about as luminous as a candle's flame on the moon would appear, seen from the earth.
    It will probe quasars, which resemble bright stars at the centre of galaxies but are believed to be powered by black holes, and are some of the most distant objects in the universe.
    The light reaching us now left them billions of years ago and we see them as they were then.
    "A telescope like this, this is the largest collecting area of a telescope in the Southern Hemisphere so that alone is telling you that we've got it in terms of real estate of mirrors to look at faint objects," Dr David Buckley, the project scientist, told Reuters. "We'll have this for many decades. They are talking about building a next generation of optical telescopes that are called extremely large telescopes or ELT."
    SALT is a massive hexagon 11 metres in diameter filled with smaller mirrored hexagons. It captured its first images of distant galaxies and stars in September.
    The observatory housing it near the town of Sutherland is a startling sight, its huge white domes set against the arid landscape of South Africa's Karoo region, selected for its clear skies and remoteness from city lights.
    The large and small Magellanic clouds, galaxies that orbit our own Milky Way, can be seen from the southern hemisphere but not the northern, and are close enough for detailed study.
    South African President Thabo Mbeki attended an inaugural ceremony for the telescope on Thursday and said it represented "the further liberation of humanity from blind action informed by superstition".
    "The great minds gathered here today to inaugurate the Southern Africa Large Telescope have the possibility to peer into ordinarily unimaginable vistas of time and space, to discover what the Universe was like, when the first stars and galaxies were formed," he said. "You will therefore not find it difficult to understand our excitement that even as we probe outer space from here, elsewhere in our country, the host of SALT, we also have the possibility to continue investigating what happened on the tiny planet we call Earth, relevant to the formation and evolution of plant, animal and human life as we have come to known."
    The telescope has been funded by a range of institutions from South Africa and around the world.
    Science and Technology Minister Mosibudi Mangena said SALT was initially conceived as a clone of the Hobby-Eberly telescope in Texas, but local astronomers had redesigned the optical system, allowing it to produce images almost two and a half times as bright.
  • Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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