In September, the installation of mirrors on three large telescopes (Large-Sized Telescope – LST) was completed on the Canary Island of La Palma. These telescopes will become part of the future Cherenkov Telescope Array observatory.
Extreme and powerful objects in the Universe, such as supermassive black holes and supernovae, emit gamma rays. The Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO) will become the world’s most powerful ground-based observatory in high-energy gamma-ray astronomy. Its Co-Spokesperson Rene Ong, who visited FZU this spring, described the scientific high-energy odyssey.
Unique Cherenkov telescopes have successfully been installed at the Ondřejov Observatory near Prague. There are two telescopes at the site, which are now the largest optical telescopes in the Czech Republic. They have been developed in the frame of the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory, and evaluated as performing telescopes in the high energy region above 1 TeV.
CTA will be the next generation ground-based instrument in the detection of gamma rays, which are very high-energy electromagnetic radiation emitted by the hottest and most powerful objects in the Universe – such as supermassive black holes, supernovae and possibly remnants of the Big Bang
The Otto Wichterle Award is a prestigious honour coming with a financial reward which has been awarded to excellent young scientists by the Czech Academy of Sciences since 2002.
The project team includes 12 institutes from 5 countries and is led by the University of Geneva. A telescope is proposed to cover the high end of CTA's observatory energy range.
CTA is a world-wide project for high-energy gamma-ray detection. More than a thousand scientists from 170 institutions work together to build the observatory for the wide astrophysical community.
