On the South African Side of the SKA. (May 23, 2013)

The May 23, 2013 issue of Nature has a short update on the radio telescope that is destined to be part of the Square Kilometre Array based in Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

 The [seven-dish] KAT-7 array, based in the Northern Cape, observed two strong radio flares from the binary-star system Circinus X-1, and monitored their progression. the findings [are published in] a paper accepted by Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (R. P. Armstrong et al. Preprint available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.3399).

KAT-7 (two dishes pictured) serves as a test bed for the MeerKAT 64-telescope array, which will form part of the larger and more powerful Square Kilometre Array (SKA). The SKA is a planned €1.5-billion (US$1.93-billion) radio-telescope array, to be built across sites in South Africa and Australia.