Astronomers have discovered a powerful radio wave laser, known as a megamaser, in space.
This record megamasser is the most distant ever observed 5 billion light years from Earth.
The light from this space laser traveled a whopping 36 trillion trillion miles (58 trillion trillion kilometers) to reach our planet.
An international team of astronomers, led by Marcin Glawacki, observed this light using the MeerKAT telescope at the South African Radio Astronomical Observatory. (MeerKAT stands for Karoo Array Telescope, preceded by the Afrikaans word for “more”.)
Głowacki is a Research Fellow at the Curtin University in Australia.
Megamasers are created when two galaxies collide with each other. This is the first hydroxyl megamaser MeerKAT has observed, Glovatsky said.
Hydroxl, a chemical group consisting of one hydrogen atom and one oxygen atom, can be found in galaxy mergers.
“When galaxies collide, the gas they contain becomes extremely dense and can trigger concentrated rays of light to fire,” Glovatsky said in a statement.
The research team called the laser Nkalakatha, which means “big boss” of isiZulu, the Bantu language of the Zulus in South Africa.
Astronomers discovered the megamaser on the first night of a study that covered more than 3,000 hours of observation time using MeerKAT.
“It’s impressive that with just one night of observations, we’ve already discovered a record-breaking mega-maser,” Glovatsky said. “It shows how good the telescope is.”
The research team continues to use MeerKAT to closely monitor narrow areas in the sky and look for the same items spied on in the mega-maser. This could give a better idea of how the universe evolved.
“We have planned follow-up observations of the mega-maser and we hope to make many more discoveries,” Glovatsky said.
The MeerKAT telescope, located in the Caru region of South Africa, includes a set of 64 radio antennas and has been in operation since July 2018. The powerful telescope is sensitive to low radio light.
MeerKAT is the forerunner of the transcontinental square kilometer or SKA, a telescope under construction in both South Africa and Australia.
The array will include thousands of plates and up to 1 million low-frequency antennas in an attempt to build the world’s largest radio telescope.
Despite the fact that these plates and antennas will be in different parts of the world, together they will create a telescope that has more than 1 square kilometer (0.39 square miles) of collection area. As a result, astronomers can explore the entire sky much faster than with other telescopes.
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