A powerful telescope in South Africa has discovered a 5 billion lightyears away space laser known as a "megamaser." It was given the name Nkalakatha, which is an isiZulu term that means "huge boss," by scientists.
Nkalakatha is the most distant hydroxyl megamaser yet identified, and the MeerKAT telescope discovered it on the first night of a study that was supposed to last 3,000 hours.
The work, "LADUMA: Discovery of a luminous OH megamaser at z>0.5," was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters by a group of scientists from the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research.
MeerKAT Finds Galactic Space Laser Billions of Light Years Away
South Africa's MeerKAT array had launched a new project seeking hydrogen signals in the far cosmos, aiming for a "cosmic vuvuzela," a horn reaching out so far that scientists could observe the universe as it was when it was less than 5 billion years old.
The project was named Looking at the Distant Universe with the MeerKAT Array ( Laduma), a Zulu word that means "it thunders" and used by South African soccer supporters to celebrate goals, Space.com reported.
The vuvuzela noisemaker gained a lot of traction during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
The Laduma study will take over 3,000 hours of observation time. But scientists didn't have to wait nearly that long to achieve breakthroughs.
"It's impressive that, with just a single night of observations, we've already found a record-breaking megamaser," said Dr. Marcin Glowacki, at the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, in a press release. "It shows just how good the telescope is."
Nkalakatha comes from a long, radio-bright tail on one side of the galaxy. Its light is estimated to be about 5 billion years old.
The study endeavor will be able to add more megamasers to the cosmic map than Nkalakatha.
MeerKAT, according to researchers, will almost certainly treble the known number of these unusual events.
Galaxies Merged More Before
Experts believe that galaxies merged more often in the past, and the newly discovered OH megamasers will allow us to test this theory.
In another statement, Jeremy Darling, a professor at the University of Colorado and a megamaser expert and co-author of the paper, said that the OH megamasers work as brilliant lights signaling that a collision of galaxies is forming new stars and feeding gigantic black holes.
The scientists intend to utilize the MeerKAT in the future to peer deeply into limited parts of the sky to understand more about how the Universe evolved through time.
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