South Pole Telescope
The South Pole Telescope (SPT) is a radio telescope with a reflector diameter of 10 m and located at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station .
The SPT works in the millimeter wave range at frequencies of 95, 150 and 220 GHz. Due to the excellent properties of the cold and dry observation location at the South Pole and the use of large bolometer cameras with currently 960 elements, large areas of the sky can be quickly mapped. The accuracy of the reflector also allows future observations in the sub-millimeter range.
The main scientific goal of the SPT is to use the Sunjajew-Seldowitsch effect to discover thousands of galaxy clusters in order to investigate the equation of state of dark energy . Anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background that are not produced by the Sunjajew-Seldowitsch effect are also observed. At the same time, the large-scale surveys with the SPT discover radio galaxies and infrared galaxies that are amplified by the gravitational lens effect at high redshifts.
The SPT is funded by the National Science Foundation . The project is a collaboration between the University of Chicago , University of California, Berkeley , Case Western Reserve University , University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign , Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory , University of Colorado at Boulder , McGill University, and University of California, Davis .
In its scientific objectives, the SPT is similar to the Atacama Cosmology Telescope .
The Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization Telescope (BICEP) is also located in the same station .
It is part of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project and was one of the telescopes of the worldwide network of eight radio telescopes, with which in 2017 (published in April 2019) the first direct images of a black hole (the supermassive black hole in M87 ) were obtained.
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Coordinates: 90 ° 0 ′ 0 ″ S