AFP published on Monday 05 December 2022 at 08:41
Australia on Monday began building a large number of antennas in its vast and desert-like hinterland in preparation for building the world’s most powerful radio telescope, project officials said.
Once erected, these antennas, coupled with a similar network built in South Africa, will form a virtual parabola called SKA (“Square Kilometer Array”). There will be answers to fundamental questions about the universe, especially its formation.
This project, born in the 1990s, was delayed due to funding and diplomatic problems.
The Director General of the SKA organization, Philip Diamond, described this start of work as a “decisive moment”. The telescope “will be one of mankind’s most important scientific endeavors,” he said.
The SKA must study some of the most violent cosmic phenomena, such as supernovae, black holes and the very first traces of the “Big Bang”, the gigantic explosion that gave birth to the universe more than 13 billion years ago.
Its name derives from the goal its designers were aiming for: a telescope with a collection area of one square kilometer.
However, the South African and Australian portions will have a combined collection area of just under half that area.
Both countries have vast desert areas that are hardly exposed to radio waves, ideal conditions for such telescopes.
More than 130,000 Christmas tree-shaped antennas are to be erected on ancestral land of the Wajarri Aboriginal people in the state of Western Australia.
The place was baptized “Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara”, which means “part the sky and the stars” in the local language.
The South African site will have almost 200 satellite dishes in the remote Karoo region.
The project will “track the birth and death of galaxies, look for new types of gravitational waves and push the frontiers of what we know about the universe,” said Sarah Pearce, director of the telescope.
Danny Price of the Curtin Institute for Radio Astronomy stated that this telescope “will be able to detect a cell phone in an astronaut’s pocket on Mars, 225 million miles away.”
The first scientific observations are expected to be made in the late 2020s.
The organization has 14 members: UK, Australia, South Africa, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the Netherlands.