New telescope chases the mysteries of radio flashes and dark energy

A new telescope was unveiled that will be built at the SKA South Africa site in the Karoo. The Hydrogen Intensity and Real-time Analysis eXperiment (HIRAX) project is an international collaboration being led by scientists from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. It’s an interferometer array that will be made up of 1024 6-metre dishes. Interferometer arrays are really cool because they combine signals from many telescopes to provide the resolution of a larger telescope. HIRAX has two main science goals: to study the evolution of dark energy by tracking neutral hydrogen gas in galaxies, and to detect and localise mysterious radio flashes called fast radio bursts. Read more