The MeerKAT radio telescope in the Northern Cape has produced the first image of thousands of distant galaxies like our own.
It has been difficult for astronomers to study the faint light coming from the so-called “cosmic noon” between 8-billion and 11-billion years ago when most stars were born.
Optical telescopes can see distant galaxies, but new stars are largely hidden inside dusty clouds of gas. Radio telescopes can see through the dust and observe the rare, bright “starburst” galaxies. But until the 2018 commissioning of MeerKAT — forerunner to the Square Kilometre Array — they have not been sensitive enough to detect the signals from distant Milky Way-like galaxies that are responsible for most of the star formation in the universe.
Mauch’s team used the 64 MeerKAT dishes to observe an area of the southern sky about the size of five full moons for a total of 130 hours. The resulting image shows tens of thousands of galaxies. Co-author James Condon, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in the US, said: “Because radio waves travel at the speed of light, this image is a time machine that samples star formation in these distant galaxies over billions of years.”
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