South Africa on Thursday unveiled the southern hemisphere's biggest telescope, intended to catch glimpses of the early universe and shed light on how it turned from "smooth" to "clumpy".
The Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) will enable scientists to view stars and galaxies a billion times too faint to be visible to the naked eye - about as luminous as a candle's flame on the moon would appear, seen from the earth. It will probe quasars, which resemble bright stars at the centre of galaxies but are believed to be powered by black holes, and are some of the most distant objects in the universe.
The light reaching us now left them billions of years ago and we see them as they were then.
"SALT gives us the ability to look far back in time," Dr David Buckley, the project scientist, told Reuters in an interview at the launch. SALT is a massive hexagon 11 metres in diameter filled with smaller mirrored hexagons. It captured its first images of distant galaxies and stars in September.