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 CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) - The southern hemisphere's largest single optical telescope with the power to study the most distant galaxies was inaugurated Thursday — a giant eye in the sky that took five years to build and cost $20 million.
More than 1,000 guests gathered on a wind-swept hillside in the bleak Karoo desert to marvel at the Southern Africa Large Telescope, or SALT, which can gather more than 25 times as much light as any existing telescope in Africa, allowing studies of distant asteroids and comets.
The telescope, 36 feet in diameter, can detect a candle flame as far away as the moon. It can record distant stars, galaxies and quasars a billion times too faint to be seen with the unaided eye. Quasars look like bright stars but are black holes at the center of galaxies and are some of the most distant objects across the universe.
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