UNC News release -- UNC is partner in largest diameter telescope in Southern Hemisphere; dedication set for Nov. 10

NEWS SERVICES

210 Pittsboro Street
Campus Box 6210
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-6210

T 919-962-2091
F 919-962-2279
www.unc.edu/news/
news@unc.edu

News Release

For immediate use

Nov. 3, 2005 -- No. 532

UNC is partner in largest diameter telescope
in Southern Hemisphere; dedication set for Nov. 10

CHAPEL HILL – The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a partner in the largest diameter telescope in the Southern Hemisphere, and university officials will attend the instrument’s upcoming dedication in Sutherland, a small town in the Northern Cape province of South Africa.

The Southern African Large Telescope, or SALT, will be able to record distant stars, galaxies and quasars a billion times too faint to be seen with the unaided eye – as faint as a candle flame at the distance of the moon. SALT began operating Sept. 1, and the Nov. 10 dedication culminates a five-year construction project.

South African President Thabo Mbeki will preside over the ceremony. Dr. Robert Shelton, executive vice chancellor and provost; Dr. Bernadette Gray-Little, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences; and Dr. Chris Clemens, physics and astronomy professor, will represent UNC at the ceremony.

"Our partnerships with SALT in South Africa, as well as with other major telescopes in Chile, give UNC faculty, graduate students and undergraduates better access to the skies over the Southern Hemisphere than any other academic institution in the United States," said Dr. Bruce Carney, senior associate dean for the sciences and Samuel Baron professor of astronomy at UNC.

"With our remote observing center here on campus, our undergraduate and graduate students, as well as the faculty, will be able to carry out their work without an excessive travel burden."

The construction and operation of SALT was made possible by the participation of 11 partners from South Africa, Poland, the United States, Germany, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. UNC contributed about $1 million to the project, through a combination of public and private funds. The entire project cost around $32 million.

SALT will be able to gather more light than any other Southern Hemisphere telescope, with a hexagonal mirror array 11 meters wide. The telescope released its first color images on Sept. 1, using its full array of mirrors and a new imaging camera named SALTICAM, marking the achievement of "first light."

SALT will allow astronomers to record light that was emitted 13.5 billion years ago and that has taken that length of time to reach earth. SALT also will enable scientists to explore not only the earliest galaxies and quasars, but the scale and age of the universe, the life and death of stars in nearby galaxies and planetary systems around other suns.

SALT rounds off and complements a three-telescope series. The Southern Observatory for Astrophysical Research, or SOAR, telescope in Cerro Pachon, Chile, began operations in late 2004. UNC plays a larger role as one of four partners in the $32-million SOAR project.

In September, UNC astronomer Dan Reichart and undergraduate student Josh Haislip used SOAR to document the distance of an explosion scientists recently determined to be the farthest ever detected: a gamma-ray burst from the edge of the visible universe.

In addition, UNC received two National Science Foundation grants totaling $912,000 in 2004 to build the six Panchromatic Robotic Optical Monitoring and Polarimetry Telescopes, or PROMPT, at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, also in the Chilean Andes. PROMPT has been in a construction phase but should begin regular science operations in the next few months. UNC is the lead partner on PROMPT, with multiple research collaborators.

In addition to UNC, SALT partners include the National Research Foundation of South Africa, Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Board, Rutgers University, the Georg-August University of Göttingen in Germany, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, Dartmouth College, Carnegie Mellon University and the United Kingdom SALT Consortium.

For information on SALT, visit http://www.salt.ac.za. To see images from SALT’s "first light," visit http://www.salt.ac.za/content/first_light/default.htm.

- 30 -