(CNN) — Astronomers detected a powerful radio wave laser, known as a megamaser, in space.
This megamaser breaks the record for being the furthest ever observed, at 5 billion light-years from Earth.
The light from this space laser traveled an impressive 58,000 trillion kilometers to reach our planet.
An international team of astronomers led by researcher Marcin Glowacki observed this light with the South African Radio Astronomical Observatory’s MeerKAT telescope. (MeerKAT is short for Karoo Array Telescope, preceded by the Afrikaans word for “more.”)
An artist’s illustration shows how the MeerKAT telescope spotted a megamaser 5 billion light-years away.
Glowacki is a research associate at Curtin University’s International Center for Radio Astronomy Research in Australia.
Megamasers are created when two galaxies collide with each other. This is the first hydroxyl megamaser the MeerKAT has managed to observe, Glowacki said.
Hydroxyl, a chemical group made up of one hydrogen and one oxygen atom, can be found inside merging galaxies.
“When galaxies collide, the gas they contain becomes extremely dense and can trigger concentrated beams of light to shoot out,” Glowacki explained in a statement.
The research team named the laser Nkalakatha, which means “great chief” in isiZulu, the Bantu language of the Zulus in South Africa.
Astronomers detected the megamaser on the first night of a study that spanned more than 3,000 hours of observation with MeerKAT.
“It’s impressive that, with just one night of observations, we have found a record-breaking megamaser,” said Glowacki. “This shows how good the telescope is.”
The research team continues to use the MeerKAT to look closely at narrow areas of the sky and look for the same features that were observed in the megamaser. This might provide more information regarding the evolution of the universe.
“We plan to make follow-up observations of the megamaser and hope to make many more discoveries,” said Glowacki.
The MeerKAT telescope, located in the Karoo region of South Africa, includes an array of 64 radio antennas and has been in operation since July 2018. The powerful telescope is sensitive to weak radio light.
The MeerKAT is a precursor to the transcontinental Square Kilometer Array, or SKA, a telescope that is built in both South Africa and Australia.
The array will include thousands of satellite dishes and up to a million low-frequency antennas in an effort to build the world’s largest radio telescope.
Although these antennas and disks will be in different parts of the world, together they will create a telescope with more than 1 square kilometer of observing surface. In this way, astronomers will be able to study the entire sky much more quickly than with other telescopes.
