MeerLicht: SA’s newest optical telescope
A unique experiment with two types of telescope could soon shed light on the mysterious phenomenon of fast radio bursts — and help us unravel the story of our origins
For the past decade, astronomers have grappled with the mystery of fast radio bursts, fleeting blasts of intense cosmic energy lasting just a few milliseconds that come from unknown sources billions of light years away. The hunt for the origins of these perplexing phenomena will soon be aided by a unique experiment unfolding in the remote reaches of the Northern Cape: the MeerLicht, a new optical telescope at the SA Astronomical Observatory near Sutherland, will be coupled with the MeerKat radio array near Carnarvon, roughly 245km away. Multi-wavelength astronomy is nothing new — for astronomers, the more information from different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum the better — but this will be the first time an optical telescope captures images of exactly the same part of the sky at the same time as a radio telescope. "This is probably the future for multi-wavelength physics," says Rob Fender of the University of Oxford. "Colleagues around the world are looking at MeerLicht and...
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