$25 million Mega Telescope will listen for radio signals from black holes

AFRICA is having the first millimeter-range astronomical observatory that helps scientists listen to black holes.

The Africa Millimeter Telescope will be the newest member of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a global network of synchronous radio observatories, according to a new report by the American Science.

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The EHT system is designed so that all telescopes work together in unison to observe radio signals associated with black holes – in 2019, researchers from the EHT project published the first image about the edge of a black hole.

The Africa Telescope, believed to cost around $25 million, will be placed around Table Mountain in the Gamsberg Nature Reserve in Namibia.

The instrument will help complete the EHT’s coverage of the night sky, as it will fill a “missing observation window on the continent”, says Roger Deane, Director of the Wits Center for Astrophysics at the University Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, told Scientific Americans.

“You have to have a telescope in the Southern Hemisphere, in South Africa, to make all those connections [to EHT’s other telescopes]”Project Way Klein Wolt added.

The observatory marks Africa’s first steps towards “consolidating .” [its] According to Charles Takalana, chief secretariat at the African Astronomical Society in Cape Town, South Africa, it is globally competitive and globally competitive.

The project is announced at the end of 2021 and will require the replacement of the telescope currently in La Silla, Chile before it is shipped to Namibia.

This instrument is being donated by the Onsala Space Observatory in Sweden and the European Southern Observatory in Germany.

The Africa Millimeter Telescope will be used in collaboration between researchers from Radboud University Nijmegen and the University of Namibia.

It will take about five years for the telescope to be built and set up before it can start listening for black holes in deep space.

The project has so far been funded by Radboud University, the University of Namibia, the European Southern Observatory and the Dutch School of Astronomical Research in Leiden.

Currently, the project is in its early stages and project managers still need to calculate issues such as the exact location of the observatory that will be located and whether additional funding will be needed.

Once the Africa telescope is up and running, the EHT says it will only require one-fifth of the total observations.

Astronomer Michael Backes, the project’s co-principal investigator, told Scientific American: “Much of the time will be available for Namibian astronomers to develop their programs.

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