The first deep-sky telescope of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere is set to shed new light on some of the darkest parts of the universe, as it begins studies from western New Wales from the South
Developed by Macquarie University, the Huntsman Telescope has been unveiled at Siding Spring Observatory, located among the mountains of the Warrumbungle Range near Coonabarabran.
Sarah Caddy, a member of the project team, said the design of the Huntsman allowed for highly specialized research into the formation and evolution of galaxies.
“When we’re looking for very faint objects, things with low surface brightness, we want to collect as much light as possible,” he said.
Built almost entirely from off-the-shelf technology, the Huntsman’s “eyes” are 10 Canon-made telephoto lenses. (ABC Western Plains: Nic Healey)
“With traditional mirror-based telescopes, they can scatter the light into parts of the field of view that we don’t want … it makes it very difficult to find these really faint things around galaxies.
“What we do is we have 10 lenses, all looking at the same point in the sky. We stack those images together to get as much light as possible.”
Built almost entirely from off-the-shelf technology, the Huntsman’s “eyes” are 10 commercially available telephoto lenses made by Canon.
It is similar in design to the Dragonfly Telescope Array designed by astronomers at Yale University, but there is none like it in the Southern Hemisphere.
The big questions
Huntsman’s team is looking for these faint objects “to try to understand how our universe evolves”, Ms Caddy said.
“When two galaxies collide, you end up with a lot of debris, and the gas and stars are stripped from the galaxy itself and are very, very faint.”
The Huntsman telescope allows researchers to look around the edges of galaxies and search for this faint debris, to reconstruct how galaxies collide and what it looks like.
“This helps us understand how the universe went from small, scattered things to larger galaxies, like spiral galaxies, like the Milky Way, and even Andromeda,” Caddy said.
Another member of the Huntsman team is Jaime Alvarado-Montes, PhD fellow at Macquarie.
The Huntsman telescope is the first of its kind in the southern hemisphere. (ABC Western Plains: Nic Healey)
He is using the telescope to search for exoplanets, planets outside our solar system. The multiple lenses allow it to reduce the amount of signal noise that comes from the atmosphere.
“It means I can observe these planets, not directly, but what we observe are these planets orbiting in front of the stars,” Alvarado-Montes said.
“You look for a dip in the stellar flux, in the light coming from the stars, that means there’s something orbiting the star and that something could be a planet.”
Capture of radio waves
Ms Caddy explained that the Huntsman could help with the study of Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs).
“As the name suggests, bursts of fast radio waves, a huge amount of energy, and we actually have no idea where they’re coming from,” he said.
The hunter approaches with the Parkes radio telescope. If Parkes detects an FRB when Huntsman looks at the same patch of sky, they share the data.
“If Parkes sees a radio burst, then we try to see if we can pick up the optical counterpart, which is the visual part of the spectrum that we can see,” Ms Caddy said.
“If we can capture something like that, it will really help us understand what these FRBs are.”
The Siding Spring Observatory in regional NSW is already home to more than 20 telescopes. (ABC Western Plains: Nic Healey)
Despite its deceptively simple construction, the Huntsman telescope packs some clever technology. Each of the 10 lenses has its own processing unit and can work independently of everything else or as a unit.
“They then send their images to the control computer and then when we stack them all together to create one image,” Ms Caddy said.
“But they’re also able to process the data in real time. If it sees something interesting, it’ll save that data and say, ‘Yeah, we’ve got something.'”
All that’s left now is for the team to finally let their baby Huntsman walk on his own.
“We’ve been spending a lot of time in the mountains up to this point,” said Mrs. Caddy.
“What we’re hoping now is that we can let the telescope go and do its thing, but now we’re like overprotective parents.”
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