Mega-telescope worth $25MILLION will listen for radio signals from black holes

AFRICA is getting its first millimeter-range astronomical observatory that will help scientists listen for black holes.

The Africa Millimetre Telescope will be the newest member of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a global network of synchronized radio observatories, according to a new report by Scientific American.

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The EHT system is designed so that all of the telescopes work together in unison to observe radio signals associated with black holes — in 2019, researchers from the EHT project published the first-ever image of a black hole’s edge.

The Africa telescope, which is said to cost about $25 million, will be situated around Table Mountain in the Gamsberg Nature Reserve in Namibia.

The instrument will help to complete EHT’s coverage of the night sky, as it will fill a “missing observing window on the continent,” Roger Deane, Director of the Wits Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, told Scientific American.

“You have to have a telescope in the Southern Hemisphere, in southern Africa, to make all those connections [to EHT’s other telescopes],” project manner Klein Wolt added.

The observatory marks Africa’s first steps towards “solidifying [its] position as a globally competitive and capable player in the field of astronomy”, according to Charles Takalana, head of the secretariat at the African Astronomical Society in Cape Town, South Africa. 

The project was announced at the end of 2021 and will require repurposing a telescope currently in La Silla, Chile before it is transported to Namibia.

The instrument is being donated courtesy of the Onsala Space Observatory in Sweden and the European Southern Observatory in Germany.

The Africa Millimetre Telescope will be used collaboratively between researchers from Radboud University Nijmegen and the University of Namibia.

It will take about five years for the telescope to get constructed and set up before it can begin listening for black holes in deep space.

The project has so far been funded by Radboud University, the University of Namibia, the European Southern Observatory, and the Netherlands Research School for Astronomy in Leiden.

At present, the project is in its early stages and project managers still need to work out issues such as where the observatory will exactly be placed, and if extra funding is required.

Once the Africa telescope is up and running, EHT said it would only require one-fifth of its total observations.

“The lion’s share of the time will be available for Namibian astronomers to develop their programs,” Astronomer Michael Backes, co-principal investigator of the project told Scientific American.

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And, the US space agency is planning for a ‘golden asteroid’ probing mission to launch this summer.