Why in news?

• Scientists in South Africa have launched the world’s first optical telescope linked to a radio telescope, combining “eyes and ears” to try to unravel the secrets of the universe.
• The device forms part of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project in the remote Karoo
  desert, which will be the world’s most powerful radio telescope system.

Square Kilometre Array:

• The SKA project is an international effort to build the world’s largest radio telescope, with eventually over a square kilometre of collecting area.
• The scale of the SKA represents a huge leap forward in both engineering and research & development towards building and delivering a unique instrument, with the detailed design and preparation now well under way.
• The SKA will eventually use thousands of dishes and up to a million low-frequency antennas that will enable astronomers to monitor the sky in unprecedented detail.
• Its unique configuration will give the SKA unrivalled scope in observations, largely
  exceeding the image resolution quality of the Hubble Space Telescope.
• South Africa’s Karoo host the core of the high and mid frequency dishes, ultimately extending over the African continent. Australia’s Murchison Shire host the low-frequency antennas.

MeerLITCH:

• The latest move combines the new optical telescope MeerLITCH — Dutch for ‘more light’
  — with the recently-completed 64-dish MeerKAT radio telescope, located 200 kilometres away.
• This is the eye, with the MeerKAT being the ears as a radio telescope.
• The MeerLITCH uses a main mirror just 65 cm in diameter and a single 100 megapixel detector measuring 10 cm x 10 cm.
• Astronomers have previously had to wait for a cosmic incident to be picked up by a radio telescope and then carry out optic observations afterwards.
• The project has been six years in the making by a joint-team of South African, Dutch and British scientists.

Purpose of MeerLITCH:

• MeerLICHT boasts of a huge field of view that allows astronomers to see an area 13 times the size of the full moon in exquisite detail, and pick up objects one million times fainter than is possible with the human eye.
• The priorities for MeerLITCH is the study of black holes, neutron stars and stellar explosions, which must be scrutinized quickly before they fade away.
• The study of exploding stars across the universe will gain a whole new dimension.
• Flashes of radio emission known as Fast Radio Bursts may now be ‘caught in the act’.
• Hopefully we can finally determine the origin of these enigmatic flashes.