Australia yesterday started building a vast network of antennas in the outback, its section of what planners say would eventually become one of the most powerful radio telescopes in the world.
When complete, the antennas in Australia and a network of dishes in South Africa would form the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a massive instrument that would aim to untangle mysteries about the creation of stars, galaxies and extraterrestrial life.
The telescope was first conceived in the early 1990s, but the project was plagued by delays, funding issues and diplomatic jockeying.
Photo: AFP / Australian Department of Industry, Science and Resources
SKA Observatory director-general Philip Diamond described the beginning of its construction as “momentous.”
The telescope “will be one of humanity’s biggest-ever scientific endeavors,” he said.
Its name is based on the planners’ original aim, a telescope that could observe a 1km2 surface, but the current South African and Australian sections would have a combined collecting area of just less than half that, the observatory said.
Photo: AFP / Australian Department of Industry, Science and Resources
Both countries have huge expanses of land in remote areas with little radio disturbance — ideal for such telescopes.
More than 130,000 Christmas tree-shaped antennas are planned in Western Australia, to be built on the traditional lands of the Wajarri people.
They have dubbed the site “Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara,” or “sharing sky and stars.”
“We honor their willingness to share their skies and stars with us as we seek to find answers to some of the most fundamental science questions we face,” Diamond said.
The South African site is to feature nearly 200 dishes in the remote Karoo region, the organization said.
Comparison between radio telescopes is difficult as they operate in different frequencies, SKA’s planners said.
However, the two sites would give SKA higher sensitivity over single-dish radio telescopes because its arrays are spread out, forming a much bigger “virtual dish,” they said.
The project would help in “charting the birth and death of galaxies, searching for new types of gravitational waves and expanding the boundaries of what we know about the universe,” telescope director Sarah Pearce said.
Danny Price, a senior research fellow at the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy, said the telescope would be extremely powerful.
“To put the sensitivity of the SKA into perspective, the SKA could detect a mobile phone in the pocket of an astronaut on Mars, 225 million kilometers away,” he said.
The SKA Observatory, headquartered at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, England, has said the telescope should start making scientific observations by the late 2020s.
The organization has 14 members: Australia, South Africa, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the UK.
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