New telescopes with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution are being unveiled around the world – and beyond. Among them are the Giant Magellan Telescope under construction in Chile, and the James Webb Space Telescope, which is parked a million and a half kilometres out in space.
This means there is a wealth of data available to scientists that simply wasn’t there before. The raw data off just a single observation from the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa’s Northern Cape province can measure a terabyte. That’s enough to fill a laptop computer’s hard drive. MeerKAT is an array of 64 large antenna dishes. It uses radio signals from space to study the evolution of the universe and everything it contains – galaxies, for example. Each dish is said to generate as much data in one second as you’d find on a DVD.
