The World's Most Powerful Telescope Just Discovered 1,230 New Galaxies (yahoo.com) 96
An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes a report from Vice:
On Saturday night astronomers at the South African MeerKAT radio telescope array fired up 16 of its recently completed dishes and released the first ever image from what is slated to become the world's most powerful radio telescope. The initial results were incredibly promising: operating with only one quarter of the 64 dishes that will eventually comprise MeerKAT, the telescope was able to find 1300 galaxies in a small corner of the universe where only 70 galaxies were known to exist previously.
Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes a report Agence France-Presse: MeerKAT's full contingent of 64 receptors will be integrated next year into a multi-nation Square Kilometer Array (SKA) which is is set to become the world's most powerful radio telescope. The images produced by MeerKAT "are far better that we could have expected," the chief scientist of the SKA in South Africa, Fernando Camilo said at the site of the dishes near the small town of Carnarvon, 600 kilometres north of Cape Town. When fully up and running in the 2020s, the SKA... will have a discovery potential 10,000 times greater than the most advanced modern instruments and will explore exploding stars, black holes, dark energy and traces of the universe's origins some 14 billion years ago.
Slashdot reader schwit1 quotes a report Agence France-Presse: MeerKAT's full contingent of 64 receptors will be integrated next year into a multi-nation Square Kilometer Array (SKA) which is is set to become the world's most powerful radio telescope. The images produced by MeerKAT "are far better that we could have expected," the chief scientist of the SKA in South Africa, Fernando Camilo said at the site of the dishes near the small town of Carnarvon, 600 kilometres north of Cape Town. When fully up and running in the 2020s, the SKA... will have a discovery potential 10,000 times greater than the most advanced modern instruments and will explore exploding stars, black holes, dark energy and traces of the universe's origins some 14 billion years ago.
Re:That much better? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re: That much better? (Score:1)
I vote for the imaginary old bearded man in the sky
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Things are engineered to at least meet the specified requirements. Many times you do better than the requirements. You don't always know how much better until you actually test the thing. This is especially true when you're at the leading edge, doing things no one has done before.
As an example, a bridge is engineered to carry at least a certain load, but exactly how much weight will it really carry? You won't know exactly unless you test it to failure. Do you consider that to be a math failure too?
Periscope (Score:1)
Now Twitter has to top that and build an array with 128 receptors.
Re:At this point... (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe. We've learned that galaxies are often in clusters, and that many are moving either together or towards a single location known as "the great attractor." If we can figure out these new galaxies' red-shifts and motion, we might learn more about the structure of the universe and in turn learn more about dark matter, dark energy, and other mysteries.
Re:Now THAT is cool to know... apk (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yeah, it's not as if we're discovering anything new anymore! Why on earth are people always wanting to push limits and go further!?
Waste of time when we could all just be playing Pokemon.
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Actually people on Earth should do well to stop pushing limits and learning instead to live within them. We wouldn't be in the environmental mess we're in now if we had grown up earlier and understood what our place is.
You are actually dead, did you know that? Quite dead. Brain-wise, social-wise and most importantly, intellectually you are dead. A zombie with a cell phone and no actual interest in life outside a safe-place and a cookie. You are bereft of any life-giving humanity. You sit alone behind a window and lookout disapprovingly while real life passes you by... everyday.
Slashcode, *sigh* (Score:5, Insightful)
"... the worldÃ(TM)s most powerful radio telescope..."
Yeah. That character encoding will get you every time. Maybe you should have hit 'preview'?
Look: I *know* character encoding is hard. But the simple ones -- curly quotes, en- and em-dashes, etc. -- are a SOLVED PROBLEM. A bunch of open-source rich-text editors solved this AGES ago. Maybe a DECADE ago by now. A few basics will save you in 99 cases out of 100.
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Problem is, the preview probably showed the text as it was input, with proper encoding. At least, that's what I saw testing the story submit right now in Firefox version 47 on Linux. So it must only be after the submission goes through that the encoding is broke. I know that “this” shows the expected quote marks in the comment preview, but don't know how it will look when submitted.
This is an area where EditorDavid should have corrected the submission, though.
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Bring back timothy
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Can you think of a good reason why the preview should do a different transformation to the actual post?
N.B. I said a good reason. Some fuckhead doing copy-paste rather than using a subroutine and they've subsequently drifted apart is only a reason.
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What's extra funny is that it's a lowercase a-with-tilde in the box -- even in the text box you get after you hit 'preview' -- but it gets converted to an uppercase a-with-tilde when submitted.
http://i.imgur.com/NgoUR8w.png [imgur.com]
Bonus funny: the story still isn't fixed, 3 days later.
They knew it would do this (Score:2)
Already KAT-7, the seven test radio telescopes that preceded this was sensitive enough to make new discoveries. And it's only going to get better from here, with the full SKA operational it'll be a new world for radio astronomy.
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South Africa seems to be in terminal decline. It's likely the array will be stripped for scrap metals before it can do much at all http://www.dailypioneer.com/co... [dailypioneer.com]. Cheaper is rarely better.
'Shopped! (Score:1)
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You can tell from the pixels this is fake
Forget the pixels, look at the shadows! All over the place!
Re:Fucking Racists (Score:5, Funny)
All the photons doing the hard work of getting here to tell us these amazing stories about these galaxies, and now the telescopes get all the credit for it. How selfish of us.
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And the control code to keep all those dishes synchronized (critical for arrays), and the code to analyze and combine the signals and... oh every other piece of code they have - is all written in Python.
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You literally have just enough information to be clearly wrong, and demonstrably so. Educate yourself a bit, then come back so I can deal with something a bit more concrete than just window licking and pants on head stupid.
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There is evidence of dark matter in our own Milky Way, there is ten times the matter than is accounted for by visible matter, and the distribution is roughly spherical not disk-shaped. the distribution of the rotational velocity of stars about the center can't be accounted for by visible matter either
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There is evidence of dark matter in our own Milky Way, there is ten times the matter than is accounted for by visible matter, and the distribution is roughly spherical not disk-shaped. the distribution of the rotational velocity of stars about the center can't be accounted for by visible matter either
#BlackMatterLives
Re:dark matter, huh? (Score:4, Funny)
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To be a bit more clear (and likely pedantic), there is observational evidence of matter moving in such a way that cannot be explained by the gravitational force alone. This observation is been made in our own galaxy, and can be mathematically accounted for by assuming a distribution of something that generates gravitational force (and the weak force) but doesn't otherwise exhibit any of the properties of what we currently think of as matter.
It seems that the scientific community has a love-fest with the
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I disagree, "experiments" can include observations of the universe.
there are other evidences for dark matter, even in the CMB.
Love fest with gravitational force? It is the force that fits the observations
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No. The gravitational force, along with an assumed distribution of something that hasn't been observed but must be common, can explain the motion.
I certainly agree that the observations are valid...but it seems to me (and yes, I'm an amateur that doesn't work in the field) that the solution was assumed and fit to the observations. The assumption of the solution (gravitational force) is the "love fest" part. This, to me, seems obvious as an outsider looking in.
I'm not even arguing against what's being pr
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No. The gravitational force, along with an assumed distribution of something that hasn't been observed but must be common, can explain the motion.
that's the very definition of dark matter
Yet, still 0% discovered... (Score:1)
Yet, still 0% discovered if we assume the universe is infinite. Anything divided by infinite equals 0.
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(a) any positive finite non-zero number divided by a positive infinite number is a positive infinitesimal number, that is a number greater than 0 but smaller than any positive "standard" number;
(b) if n is a positive infinite number and N is a greater infinite number then N/n is greater than or equal to some finite positive standard number, and might be in
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Yet, still 0% discovered if we assume the universe is infinite. Anything divided by infinite equals 0.
The space might be infinite but there are a finite number of things in it.
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Douglas Adams begs to differ.
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The space might be infinite but there are a finite number of things in it
Douglas Adams begs to differ.
Probably [wikia.com]
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If you assume that, then I am sure that you have a good reason for making that assumption. What is your reason - or reasons?
I see no reason to make that assumption.
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Please don't talk about things your humain brain can't understand and have a look at my signature.
Cheers and have a nice day! ;-)
All that is wrong with Slashdot (Score:1)
Once upon a time (15+ years ago) this kind of topic would have garnered a lot of interesting discussion. Slowly but surely the posts have become less informed and more cynical. Now a topic like this just generates a raft of cynical stupidity. Not even sure why I come here anymore.
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You come here because as bad as it is, it is far better than comment boards on general news sites and youtube. Though I agree, it is getting harder to tell the difference.
standing up to take a look (Score:2)
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That is correct, meerkat is a loanword in English from Afrikaans (there aren't many but this is one of the few - others include zebra and veld), KAT was the first, tiny stage of the array, and 'meer' is the Afrikaans for 'more' (also for 'lake' for some reason) - meerKAT then is, indeed, a cute and clever name.
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German has a similar pair: 'mehr' (more) and 'Meer' (sea/ocean). English also has something similar, but less obvious: 'more' and 'marine' (from the latin 'Mare' meaning sea).
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You are aware that Afrikaans is southern-exported Swamp German? It's al lot closer to German than English or Norwegian are.
Mind boggling (Score:2)
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Hell, I refuse to believe we're the best EARTH can do. If the best didn't exist in the 4.3 billion years before we showed up - it will exist in the expected 5-billion odd years after we're long gone.
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With "geoengineering, we might be able to extend it to a couple of billion years.
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I doubt very much we have that much. The average life expectancy of a species is 10 million years - we'are already there (depending how you define 'human'). But a billion years ? Highly unlikely. A few species that old exist, but they are the one or two out of hundreds of millions - the odds are definitely against us.
That does raise the suggestion that - when this happens, as it starts at least, the animals that replace us will evolve for this ever hotter climate. It's not entirely unreasonable to think the
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Actually, it is entirely unreasonable to assume that. For hundreds of millions of years before the Sun "swallows the Earth" (itself still only about a 50% probability ; predicting the exact degree of stellar swelling in the red giant phase is beyond current astrophysics), the Earth will be baked to the degree of Mercury, then Venus, then maybe to the point of a magma ocean then erosion by the plasma
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Nope, not aware of any creature that can live in that, but we've found creatures in every environment on earth no matter how inhospitable to all other known life. Extremeophile bacteria living around volcanic vents in the deepest trenches of the ocean. Single celled organisms that live in the dead sea.
Nothing like that exists - but if the change is gradual enough - something might. Live seems to live everywhere it can't.
Enter the pedant... (Score:1)
I'm an old and obnoxious astronomer so I'm going to make the obligatory complaint about the oxymoronic term "radio telescope". "Tele" refers to the visual spectrum of light, not radio. The MeerKAT is, in fact, a radio interferometer.
Please proceed to contradict and/or down vote this post. Your cooperation is assumed.
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To be pedantic, not "tele" refers to the visual spectrum but "scope". Ancient Greek "tele" means "far" and "skopos" means "watcher". I have no problem with extending "watcher" to the non-visual part of the spectrum, it's closer than "listener" or othert terms related to human sense organs.
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Dear Mr Old and Obnoxious astronomer, please take note that tele doesn't refer to the visible spectrum of light, nor does it refer to electromagnetic radiation. It is a prefix coming from the Greek word tele meaning far.
The second part of the word, scope, is derived from the Latin and Greek words scopium and skopein meaning to look at
So the combined word telescope means to look at far/distant, nothing more, nothing less, and that is why we have optical telescopes (for optical distant viewing), radio teles
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Don't forget 'confused by Greek' when describing yourself in the future :)
C'mon (Score:2)
"The world's most powerful telescope just discovered 1230 new galaxies"
C'mon, they couldn't discover 4 more?
Comment (Score:1)
Shoot, there went the neighborhood!
That IS a pretty impressive image... (Score:1)
http://www.ska.ac.za/releases/20160716.php [ska.ac.za] shows a small patch of it and says that image "spans about the area of the Earth's moon". Assuming they meant to say the moon's diameter it would mean that the big image is approximately 3 degrees square.
It would be nice to know exactly where that patch of sky is though; to match it up with a visible image.