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Credit: South African Large Telescope Project
The 11-meter South African Large
Telescope (SALT) with a hexagonal mirror
array, is the largest single telescope
in the southern hemisphere. SALT will
be able to record distant stars,
galaxies and quasars a billion times too
faint to be seen with the unaided eye.
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Rutgers joined 10 partners worldwide to release the first full-color images made by the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) in South Africa. This milestone marks the debut of scientific observations on the Southern hemisphere’s largest telescope.
The new images provide views of newly born stars amid brilliantly glowing gas clouds, clusters of stars more than twice the age of our own sun, and another galaxy similar to our own Milky Way.
SALT, capable of detecting objects as faint as a candle flame on the moon, is located about 220 miles inland from Cape Town. The telescope took five years to build – a rapid schedule for such an undertaking – and costs have been kept within the original $20 million budget.
Rutgers holds a 10 percent partnership in SALT, having contributed $2.4 million toward construction. The university has committed an additional $1 million for operations during the first 10 years. In 1999, Rutgers became the first institutional partner to join the National Research Foundation of South Africa in the SALT project.
Theodore Williams, professor of physics and astronomy in New Brunswick, said the telescope will close a knowledge gap for astronomers worldwide. “For the first time, astronomers can now have a detailed 24-hour view of the southern night sky by combining South African observations with similar images from telescopes in Australia and Chile,” Williams said. “This is essential for studying objects that change rapidly, such as supernovae and time-variable stars.”
Rutgers and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, another SALT partner, are deploying an advanced instrument package on the telescope that will give astronomers new insights into the building blocks of the universe – from dust clouds to star clusters to distant galaxies. The instrument, known as a spectrograph, will break down light into colors, or wavelengths, to examine such properties as the temperatures and chemical compositions of stars as well as how fast they are moving.
Rutgers contributed key imaging and structural elements to the spectrograph, including a 6-foot-wide metal truss on which the instrument will be mounted 10 stories above the telescope’s 36-foot-wide (11 meter) mirror array. Rutgers instrument makers meticulously assembled the truss from an exotic metal alloy that maintains its shape to one-thousandth of an inch under the wide temperature swings of South Africa’s high plains – essential to ensure sharp images during long exposures.
SALT is one of several activities that Rutgers has undertaken in South Africa. Others include programs in journalism, education and business.
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