New telescope chases the mysteries of radio flashes and dark energy

Then the team will need to figure out smart ways to compress, store and analyse this data. That will require big data hardware and software.

A new telescope was unveiled that will be built at the SKA South Africa site in the Karoo. The Hydrogen Intensity and Real-time Analysis eXperiment (HIRAX) project is an international collaboration being led by scientists from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. It’s an interferometer array that will be made up of 1024 6-metre dishes. Interferometer arrays are really cool because they combine signals from many telescopes to provide the resolution of a larger telescope. HIRAX has two main science goals: to study the evolution of dark energy by tracking neutral hydrogen gas in galaxies, and to detect and localise mysterious radio flashes called fast radio bursts. Read more

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