Their huge collecting area will allow the SKA telescopes to produce images with 10-100 times the fidelity of current instruments, detecting objects far fainter and further away than can be seen by existing telescopes. How much more powerful will the SKA telescopes be compared to current ones? Radio waves also track magnetism across cosmic scales and can even trace the hydrogen gas that made up the first stars: through radio astronomy, we have a time machine that we can use to see the universe light up during the cosmic dawn. Radio astronomy can study these objects to test Einstein’s theory of gravity and to see how galaxies have evolved over the history of the universe. Through radio astronomy, we see the universe in a completely different way, revealing extreme events in space that would otherwise remain invisible: spinning pulsars tearing up space and time jets of plasma spewed away from supermassive black holes at close to the speed of light. Why is radio astronomy important to our understanding of the universe? Perhaps the most exciting thing of all, in the great tradition of radio astronomy, is the potential for completely new discoveries: the exploration of the unknown. The SKA telescopes will be used by people all over the world to study a whole range of phenomena, from the puzzles of dark matter and dark energy to the signatures of life beyond Earth. What do you hope to achieve with the SKA telescopes? We asked Philippa Hartley, an Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO) scientist a few frequently asked questions about the project.ĭr Philippa Hartley is an astrophysicist and project scientist for the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO). is not without its contribution to the SKA Observatory as its headquarters is at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, England. In contrast, from more northerly countries such as the U.K., the core of our galaxy barely scrapes above the horizon during the summer months. Sites in the Southern Hemisphere were chosen to be the locations of the SKA Observatory because they have a clear view of the entirety of the Milky Way, as well as views out into intergalactic space. Why build the SKA telescopes in the Southern Hemisphere? Meanwhile, the 131,072 small, low-frequency antennas form a steel forest of two-meter-tall (6.6 feet) wire structures, divided into 512 stations of 256 antennas each, located at Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, the CSIRO Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia. Increasing the baseline will increase the SKA-Mid telescope's resolving power, so that it can resolve finer detail in radio-emitting objects. Astronomers call this distance between one side of the array to the other the ' baseline' and, in the future, the plan is to extend the telescope's baseline by building more remote dishes in nearby countries, including Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia.
The large dishes will be located in a region of South Africa called the Karoo, and the largest distance between any two dishes is 93 miles (150 km). The SKA telescopes will consist of 197 large, parabolic radio dishes, and 131,072 low-frequency antennas. The result is that each array acts as one giant telescope rather than myriad smaller telescopes.
#Kilometre array software
Thousands of miles of optical fiber link the individual dishes and antennas, and sophisticated software is able to take the data that each telescope collects and combine it precisely, using perfect synchronization for the different times it takes for the signals from the various dishes and antennas to reach the central processing system. Optical fibers will link individual dishes.
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