Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/SYDNEY: Australia on Monday started constructing its portion of what will eventually be one of the largest radio telescopes in the world, beginning with a vast network of antennas in the Outback.
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA), when complete, will be made up of antennas in Australia and a network of dishes in South Africa. This enormous instrument will work to solve the mysteries surrounding the formation of stars, galaxies, and extraterrestrial life.
The telescope’s concept was first conceived in the early 1990s, but delays, funding problems, and political wrangling plagued the project. Director-General Philip Diamond of the SKA Observatory called the start of construction “momentous.” According to him, building the telescope “will be one of humanity’s biggest-ever scientific endeavours.”
Telescope to observe square kilometer surface in Australia
The observatory claims that the current South African and Australian sections will have a combined collecting area of slightly less than half of the telescope’s original name, a telescope that could observe a one-square-kilometer surface.
Both nations have vast tracts of land in isolated locations with little radio interference, making them ideal for such telescopes. In Western Australia, it is planned to erect more than 130,000 antennas in the shape of Christmas trees on Wajarri Aboriginal people’s ancestral lands.
The website is known as “Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara,” which means “sharing sky and stars.” According to Diamond, “We honour their willingness to share their skies and stars with us as we seek to understand some of the most fundamental scientific questions we face.”
The organisation claims that the South African website will offer nearly 200 dishes in the isolated Karoo region. The planners of the SKA assert that it is challenging to compare radio telescopes because they use different frequencies.
The two locations, however, will reportedly give SKA greater sensitivity than single-dish radio telescopes due to the spread-out nature of its arrays, which create a much larger “virtual dish,” according to their claims.
The research will aid in “charting the birth and death of galaxies, hunting for new types of gravitational waves and pushing the bounds of what we know about the cosmos,” according to telescope director Sarah Pearce.
The telescope would have a tremendous amount of power, according to Danny Price from the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy. He said that the SKA could “detect a mobile phone in the pocket of an astronaut on Mars, 225 million kilometers away” as an example of its sensitivity.
By the end of the 2020s, according to the SKA Observatory, which has its main office in Britain’s Jodrell Bank, the telescope should begin making scientific observations.
There are 14 members of the organization: the United Kingdom, Australia, India, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, China, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.
