How visionary scientist Bernie Fanaroff put African astronomy on the map

Latest many years have seen exceptional progress in astronomy on the African continent. Africa enjoys pristine darkish skies and huge radio quiet zones, making it the best residence for a lot of superior telescopes skilled on our galaxy and past.

For example, Namibia hosts the Excessive Vitality Spectroscopic System (HESS), which is a formidable gamma-ray telescope. The Southern African Massive Telescope (SALT) within the small South African city of Sutherland is the biggest optical telescope within the southern hemisphere. The MeerKAT telescope in South Africa’s arid and sparsely populated Karoo area is likely one of the world’s strongest radio telescopes. It’s also one of many precursor telescopes which have been inbuilt preparation for an almighty radio telescope known as the Sq. Kilometre Array (SKA).

The SKA is a world mega-science mission. A part of will probably be inbuilt South Africa and can incorporate MeerKAT. The opposite half shall be inbuilt Western Australia. Building of the SKA is anticipated to start this yr.

By way of these and different initiatives, Africa is starting to emerge as a world chief in astronomy. Many good scientists contribute to this standing — however with out one, Dr Bernie Fanaroff, the SKA may by no means have come to South African shores.

We’re each astronomers and, in March 2019 launched a podcast, The Cosmic Savannah, to showcase the wonderful astronomy and astrophysics popping out of the African continent. After we reached the fiftieth episode, Bernie was the apparent visitor for the landmark event.

Who higher than Bernie, we thought, to mirror on how the self-discipline reached this level.

Globally well-known

Fanaroff is likely one of the key people accountable for the present progress and power of astronomy in South Africa. He’s a world-renowned radio astronomer who, whereas engaged on his PhD at Cambridge College within the early Seventies, made a breakthrough discovery about radio galaxies. Radio galaxies include supermassive black holes at their cores which spew out big jets of plasma and glow at radio wavelengths.

Bernie and his collaborator, a British astronomer named Julia Riley, have been a number of the first folks to look at high-resolution pictures of such radio galaxies. They observed that the luminosity of a radio galaxy was intently associated to the form of the plasma jets. This led to what turned often called the “Fanaroff-Riley” classification system, nonetheless used at the moment, during which galaxies are grouped by their “Fanaroff-Riley” kind.

However it took many years for Fanaroff to study {that a} classification system had been named partly in his honour. He left the sphere of astronomy shortly after finishing his PhD. Incensed by the poor remedy of staff in apartheid South Africa, he joined the Nationwide Union of Metalworkers, ultimately changing into its nationwide secretary. He later served in Nelson Mandela’s authorities, starting in 1994.

Come 2003, he attended an astronomy convention – and found he was world well-known. He informed us:

One or two folks stated to me, ‘Are you the Fanaroff of Fanaroff-Riley?’ This was truly information to me. And so they stated, ‘We thought you have been lifeless! We heard you’d died as a result of no one’s heard something of you since, you recognize, 1974.’ So I stated, ‘No, I haven’t died and it’s me,’ but it surely was all a little bit of a shock.

After this, Fanaroff returned to astronomy: he turned the mission director for South Africa’s bid to host the Sq. Kilometre Array Telescope. Each South Africa and Australia have been finalists within the bid; in 2012 it was determined by the worldwide SKA consortium that the telescope could be break up between each websites.

An extended-term imaginative and prescient

Fanaroff and his colleague, Professor Justin Jonas, drove the bid. In our interview, he recalled:

So [Jonas] stated, if we’re going to have the world’s largest telescope in South Africa and in Africa, we higher develop a neighborhood of radio astronomers and engineers who can construct it and use it. So we have been capable of persuade our steering committee that we must always begin constructing a precursor.

The mission shortly turned about extra than simply science: it additionally drove human capability improvement in South African astronomy. On the time of the SKA bid there have been solely 5 or 6 radio astronomers within the nation.

He defined:

“We determined very early on that we needed to give attention to getting the younger folks into science and ensuring that we might develop them. So we put apart cash for grants for undergraduate examine in physics and engineering, for postgraduate examine, for masters and PhD college students, for analysis fellows.”

Finally, it was this long-term imaginative and prescient which led to Bernie and his staff touchdown the largest world scientific mission in Africa.

A brilliant age of astronomy

Due to folks like Bernie, the longer term is brilliant for African astronomy. His message to younger researchers, he stated on the podcast, is:

I believe that you just’re truly in a golden age of astronomy and I actually envy you and the opposite younger people who find themselves coming into astronomy. Now you’ve received the MeerKAT, however you’ll quickly have the SKA, which shall be an exquisite telescope.

He added: “You’ll have the (James Webb House Telescope), which shall be a revolutionary optical and infrared telescope. You’ve received all the opposite new telescopes, the Extraordinarily Massive Telescope (in Chile), gamma-ray telescopes. And naturally, you’ve now received gravitational wave telescopes. So that you’re in a golden age the place you’re going to be having so many alternatives.”

Daniel Cunnama, Science Engagement Astronomer, South African Astronomical Observatory, South African Astronomical Observatory and Jacinta Delhaize, Lecturer, College of Cape City

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