The first deep sky telescope of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere is ready to shed new light on some of the darkest parts of the universe, as it begins surveys from western New South Wales.
Developed by Macquarie University, the Huntsman Telescope has been unveiled at Siding Spring Observatory, nestled among the mountains of the Warrumbungle Range near Coonabarabran.
Project team member Sarah Caddy said the design of the Huntsman allowed highly specialised research into galaxy formation and evolution.
"When we're looking for really faint objects, things with low surface brightness, we want to collect as much light as possible," she said.
"With traditional mirror-based telescopes, they can scatter the light into parts of the field of view that we don't want … it makes it really difficult to find those really faint things around galaxies.
Built almost entirely from off-the-shelf technology, the "eyes" of the Huntsman are 10 commercially available Canon-built telephoto lenses.
It is similar in design to the Dragonfly Telescope Array designed by astronomers from Yale University, but there are none like it in the Southern Hemisphere.
The big questions
The Huntsman team is seeking out these faint objects "to try and understand how our universe evolves", Ms Caddy said.
"When two galaxies collide, you end up getting a lot of debris, and gas and stars are stripped away from the galaxy itself and is really, really faint."
The Huntsman telescope lets researchers look around the edges of galaxies and hunt for that faint debris, to piece together how galaxies collide and what it looks like.
"That helps us to understand how the universe went from small, scattered things around to larger galaxies, like the spiral galaxies, like the Milky Way, and even the Andromeda as well," Ms Caddy said.
Another member of the Huntsman team is Jaime Alvarado-Montes, a fellow PhD candidate at Macquarie.
He is using the telescope to look for exoplanets — planets outside our solar system. The multiple lenses allow him to reduce the amount of signal noise coming from the atmosphere.
"You look for a dip in the stellar flux, in the light coming from the stars — that means that there's something orbiting around the star, and that something could be a planet."
Capturing radio waves
Ms Caddy explained that the Huntsman could help with the study of Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs).
"As the name suggests, bursts of fast radio waves, a huge amount of energy, and we actually have no idea where they come from," she said.
The Huntsman tags in with the Parkes radio telescope. If Parkes detects an FRB when the Huntsman is looking at the same patch of sky, they share the data.
"If Parkes sees a radio burst, then we try and see if we can catch the optical counterpart — that's the visual part of the spectrum that we can see," Ms Caddy said.
"If we do manage to capture something like that, that's really going to help us understand what these FRBs are."
Despite its deceptively simple build, the Huntsman Telescope packs in some smart technology. Each of the 10 lenses has its own processing unit, and they can operate independently from everything else or as a unit.
"Then they send their images to the control computer, and then when we stack them all together to create one image," Ms Caddy said.
All that is left now is for the team to finally let its baby Huntsman walk on its own.
"We've been spending a lot of time on the mountain up until this point," Ms Caddy said.
"What we're hoping now is that we can just let the telescope go and do its thing, but we're kind of like over-protective parents right now."
