The Southern Hemisphere's first deep sky telescope seeks to uncover the secrets of the universe

The Southern Hemisphere’s first deep-sky telescope is poised to shed new light in some of the darkest parts of the universe, as it begins its survey of western New South Wales.

Developed by Macquarie University, the Hunter Telescope has been unveiled at the Siding Spring Observatory, nestled among the mountains of the Warrumbungle Range near Coonabarabran.

Project team member Sarah Caddy says the Huntsman design allows for highly specialized research into the formation and evolution of galaxies.

“When we look for very dim objects, objects with low surface brightness, we want to collect as much light as possible,” he said.

Built almost entirely from ready-to-use technology, the Hunter’s “eyes” are Canon’s 10 telephoto lenses.(ABC Western Plains: Nic Healey)

“With traditional mirror-based telescopes, they can scatter light into parts of the field of view that we don’t want … that makes it very difficult to find very dim things around galaxies.

“What we do is we have 10 lenses, all looking at the same place in the sky. We put those images together to get as much light as possible.”

Built almost entirely from ready-to-use technology, the Hunter’s “eyes” are Canon’s 10 commercially available telephoto lenses.

It is similar in design to the Dragonfly Telescope Array designed by astronomers from Yale University, but there is nothing quite like it in the Southern Hemisphere.

Big question

The Huntsman team is searching for this cryptic object “to try and understand how our universe evolved”, Caddy said.

“When two galaxies collide, you end up getting a lot of debris, and the gas and stars flake off of the galaxy itself and get really dim.”

The Huntsman telescope allows researchers to look around the edges of galaxies and hunt for this faint debris, to piece together how galaxies collided and what they looked like.

“That helps us to understand how the universe is changing from small scattered things to bigger galaxies, like spiral galaxies, like the Milky Way, and even Andromeda too,” said Caddy.

Another member of the Hunters team is Jaime Alvarado-Montes, a fellow PhD candidate at Macquarie.

The Hunter Telescope is the first of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere.(ABC Western Plains: Nic Healey)

He uses a telescope to search for exoplanets — planets outside our solar system. Some lenses allow it to reduce the amount of signal noise coming from the atmosphere.

“That means I can observe these planets, not directly, but what we observe is that these planets orbit in front of the stars,” said Alvarado-Montes.

“You’re looking for a decrease in stellar flux, in the light coming from the stars – that means there’s something orbiting around the star, and that something could be a planet.”

Catch radio waves

Caddy explains that Huntsman can help study Fast Radio Bursts (FRB).

“As the name suggests, it’s a fast burst of radio waves, a huge amount of energy, and we don’t actually know where it’s coming from,” he said.

The Huntsman enters with the Parkes radio telescope. If Parkes detects the FRB while the Hunters are looking at the same swath of sky, they will share the data.

“If Parkes sees a radio burst, then we try and see if we can catch an optical pair — that’s the visual part of the spectrum that we can see,” Caddy said.

“If we manage to catch something like that, it’s really going to help us understand what an FRB is.”

The Siding Spring Observatory in the NSW area is already home to more than 20 telescopes.(ABC Western Plains: Nic Healey)

Despite its simplistic appearance, the Huntsman Telescope packs some clever technology. Each of the 10 lenses has its own processing unit, and they can operate independently of the others or as a single unit.

“Then they send their images to the control computer, and then when we stack them all together to make one image,” Caddy said.

“But they can also process data in real time. If it sees something interesting, it saves that data and says, ‘Yeah, we have something’.”

All that’s left now is for the team to finally let the baby Hunters walk on their own.

“We’ve spent a lot of time on the mountain so far,” Caddy said.

“What we hope now is that we can let the telescope go and do its job, but we’re like overprotective parents now.”

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