OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Wednesday
AN infrared telescope and camera developed by South African and Japanese scientists and capable of photographing stars never seen before officially starts operating in the tiny Karoo town of Sutherland this week.
The R18m telescope is situated at the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) site near Sutherland, about 250km northeast of Cape Town.
The Infra Red Survey Facility (IRSF) will use infrared radiation, which can penetrate haze and dust clouds, to peer into galaxies, SAAO director Bob Stobie said in Cape Town this week.
“Infrared light is also ideal for studying cool stars that radiate most of their energy at wavelengths too long for the eye to see,” Stobie said.
A camera, known as “Sirius”, attached to the telescope will be able to record images picked up by infrared light.
The data will help scientists better understand how stars were formed, said the University of Tokyo’s Tetsuo Hasegawa, who heads the Japanese side of the project.
“With the Sirius camera, stars 100 times fainter than those seen before can be photographed,” he said.
The first pictures are expected within “a matter of weeks,” Hasegawa said.
The new telescope will allow astronomers in Japan, which provided the bulk of the funding for the project, a better view of earth’s own galaxy, the Milky Way, because of its situation, he said.
“The centre of the Milky Way galaxy can only be seen at an angle of 25 degrees above the horizon in Japan,” he said.
The telescope will be focused on the two galaxies nearest to the earth – the greater and small Magellanic Clouds – and the central region of the Milky Way, SAAO senior astronomer Ian Glass said.
The telescope will be the second largest at the Sutherland observatory. Construction started two months ago on the largest telescope in southern hemisphere, the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT).
SALT is scheduled to be completed in 2005 and half of its $14m construction cost will be met by South Africa, with New Zealand, the United States, Germany, Poland and Britain contributing the other half. – AFP