Australia has built a powerful new telescope

Australia celebrates the finishing point of construction the telescope, which is considered the most powerful telescope for radio survey in the world. The Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) will give astronomers an unprecedented opportunity to look at black holes, gas clouds from which stars form, and "unusual objects that are on the edge of our understanding of the physical laws of the universe," said astrophysicist Brian Boyle (Brian Boyle) Organization of Australian Scientific and Industrial Research of the Commonwealth.

ASKAP, built in radio astronomy observatory Murchison, Western Australia, consists of 36 antennas, 12 meters in diameter. Boyle said that with its wide field of view and high speed data acquisition, the new telescope will be able to display two images - the cost of monitoring for five minutes - the types of galaxies to show that previously would have taken 400 pictures and two years to collect information.

The telescope will be available to the global community. In the first five years of the observatory ASKAP will participate in observations 350 scientists from 150 institutions located around the world. The program will consist of the telescope: gathering information about the galaxies that lie no further than 2 billion light-years from Earth, the study of cosmic magnetic fields, the search of black holes, as well as observations of pulsars and quasars.

From 2016 to the ASKAP telescope will begin construction of additional 60 plates - this expansion due to the fact that the telescope will be part of the project the largest radio telescope in the world, The Square Kilometer Array (SKA), which will be located in two places: in South Africa and in Australia.