(MENAFN- Gulf Times) If astronomers and amateur sky gazers were saddened by the collapse of the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, which was the second-largest single-dish radio telescope in the world, in December 2020, there is something major to cheer about now. Last Wednesday and Thursday, the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO) Council held its maiden meeting online and approved the establishment of the world's largest radio telescope. The initiative is described as one of the grand scientific projects of the 21st century. SKAO is a new intergovernmental organisation dedicated to radio astronomy. The council meeting was led by countries that have ratified the SKA treaty: Australia and South Africa, as the telescope's host nations; Italy, The Netherlands, Portugal; and the UK, which functions as the organisation's headquarters with offices at the famous Jodrell Bank radio observatory. In attendance also were representatives from Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. They sat as observers as their parliamentary approvals are pending.
Unlike optical telescopes, radio telescopes can detect invisible gas and, therefore, they can reveal areas of space that may be obscured by cosmic dust. Since the first radio signals were detected by physicist Karl Jansky in the 1930s, astronomers have used radio telescopes to detect radio waves emitted by different objects in the universe and explore it. According to Nasa, the field of radio astronomy evolved after World War II and became one of the most important tools for making astronomical observations since. The Arecibo telescope, built in 1963, thanks to its powerful radar, was employed to observe planets, asteroids and the ionosphere, making several discoveries over the decades, including finding prebiotic molecules in distant galaxies, the first exoplanets, and the first-millisecond pulsar.
The SKA telescope, comprising a vast formation of radio receivers, will be located in remote, uninhabited locations in the Karoo in South Africa's Northern Cape, and in the Murchison in Western Australia. The operation, maintenance and construction will be overseen by SKAO. The completion is expected to take nearly a decade at a cost of over $2.4bn. The expectation is that invitations to tender will go out to industry from July, with ground-breaking ceremonies anticipated towards the end of the year.
The telescope will incorporate a mix of parabolic antennas, or 'dishes, as well as dipole antennas, which look a little like traditional TV aerials. The aim is to construct an effective collecting area measuring hundreds of thousands of square metres. The system will operate across a frequency range from roughly 50 megahertz to, ultimately, 25 gigahertz. In wavelength terms, this is in the centimetres to metres range. With the engineered sensitivity, this should enable the telescope to detect very faint radio signals coming from cosmic sources billions of light-years from Earth, including those signals emitted in the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang when the first galaxies and stars started forming.
The array's resolution and sensitivity, allied to stellar computing support, will enable astronomers to address some of the most fundamental questions in astrophysics today including the beginning of the universe, how and when the first stars were born, the life-cycle of a galaxy, exploring the possibility of detecting technologically-active civilisations elsewhere in our galaxy and understanding where gravitational waves come from.
Significantly, the development of SKA will use the results of various surveys undertaken using another powerful telescope called the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), developed and operated by the country's science agency CSIRO. This telescope, fully operational since February 2019, mapped over three million galaxies in a record 300 hours during its first all-sky survey conducted late last year. ASKAP surveys are designed to map the structure and evolution of the Universe, which it does by observing galaxies and the hydrogen gas that they contain.
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