The clearest image ever of the centre of our galaxy has been released, captured from a telescope on South African soil.

The MeerKAT telescope — a precursor to the Square Kilometre Array — is managed by South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) and consists of 64 antennae spread over a diameter of 8km in the Northern Cape. 

The image shows radio emission from the region with “unprecedented clarity and depth” and is a culmination of three years of detailed analysis of a survey conducted during the telescope’s commissioning phase, according to a statement released by SARAO.

The international team behind the work is publishing the initial data from the image in The Astrophysical Journal for the worldwide astronomical community to explore further.

“The image captures radio emission from numerous phenomena, including outbursting stars, stellar nurseries and the chaotic region about the 4-million solar mass supermassive black hole that lurks in the centre of our galaxy, 25,000 light-years from Earth,” said the statement.

Radio waves penetrate the intervening dust that obscures the view of this region at other wavelengths. 

“I’ve spent a lot of time looking at this image while working on it, and I never get tired of it,” said Dr Ian Heywood from the University of Oxford, Rhodes University and SARAO, and lead author of the study. 

“When I show this image to people who might be new to radio astronomy, or otherwise unfamiliar with it, I always try to emphasise that radio imaging hasn’t always been this way, and what a leap forward MeerKAT really is in terms of its capabilities.”

The new image is based on a mosaic of 20 separate observations using 200 hours of telescope time covering an area of six square degrees (30 times the area of the full moon). 

Dr Fernando Camilo, SARAO chief scientist, said: “The best telescopes expand our horizons in unexpected ways. It’s a testament to the skill and dedication of our South African colleagues who built MeerKAT that it’s making such remarkable discoveries in one of the most intensively studied corners of the radio sky.”

He added: “The image we’re sharing today is rich with scientific potential, and we very much look forward to further surprises as the astronomical community mines these data for years to come.”

MeerKAT, originally the Karoo Array Telescope, was inaugurated in 2018 and is the most sensitive telescope of its sort in the world.