Today marks the official start of construction on the largest radio telescope in the world, which will span two continents. Let’s examine the telescope and its parts and see why it represents a major advancement. With remote observatories in South Africa’s Karoo region and Western Australia’s Mid West, the SKA, or Square Kilometre Array, will cover two continents. These observatories will function as one telescope with a collecting area of roughly one square kilometer when they are combined.
The project has reportedly been in development for about three decades. This enormous telescope hailed as one of the largest scientific undertakings will allow researchers to raise the curtain and look back in time.
The SKA will initially involve two telescope arrays; SKA- Low and SKA-Mid
With the aid of the SKA, scientists will be able to examine dark energy and learn why the universe is expanding by going back in time to the Big Bang when the first stars and galaxies were created. The SKA will initially consist of the SKA-Low and SKA-Mid telescope arrays.
Wajarri region in outback Western Australia will be the site of SKA-Low, which will include 131,072 tree-like antennas divided into 512 stations with 256 antennas each. The reason it is called SKA-Low is that it will supposedly be eight times more sensitive to low-frequency radio transmissions than any of the currently available equivalent telescopes. Additionally, it will be 135 times faster than any comparable existing telescope in mapping the sky. It will have a frequency range of 50 MHz to 350 MHz.
Its design included input from organizations in Australia, China, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, and the UK. The CSIRO and the SKA Organization are working together to erect and run the telescopes in Australia. “The telescope will explore the first billion years, mapping the structure of the early Universe for the first time, watching the births and deaths of the first stars, and helping us to understand how the earliest galaxies formed.”