• On Monday, the building phase of one of the most important scientific projects of the 21st century starts.
• When it is done in 2028, the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) will be the largest radio telescope in the world.
• The facility will answer the most important questions in astrophysics. It will be in South Africa and Australia, with its main office in the UK.

When it is done in 2028, the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) will be the largest radio telescope in the world.

The facility will answer the most important questions in astrophysics. It will be in South Africa and Australia, with its main office in the UK.

It will test Einstein’s ideas in the most precise ways and even look for life from other planets.

In the remote Murchison shire in Western Australia and in the Karoo in South Africa’s Northern Cape, delegates from the eight countries in charge of the project are taking part in ceremonies.

When the party is over, the bulldozers will start moving in.

Prof. Phil Diamond, who is in charge of the Square Kilometre Array Organisation, said, “This is the moment when it becomes real.”

“It’s been 30 years since we started. During the first 10 years, the ideas and concepts were put together. The second 10 years were used to improve the technology. The last ten years were spent planning in detail, securing the sites, and getting governments to agree to make a treaty organisation (SKAO) and give the money to get started “he said.
The telescope will be made up of just under 200 parabolic antennas, or “dishes,” and 131,000 dipole antennas, which look a bit like Christmas trees.

The goal is to build an effective area for collecting that is tens of thousands of square metres in size.

This will give the SKA a level of sensitivity and resolution that has never been seen before when it looks for things in the sky.

The system will work on a range of frequencies from about 50 megahertz up to 25 gigahertz. In terms of wavelength, this is somewhere between centimetres and metres.

This should make it possible for the telescope to pick up very faint radio signals coming from cosmic sources billions of light-years from Earth, including signals sent out in the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

One of the SKA’s main goals will be to figure out how hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, came to be.

The telescope should be able to find hydrogen even before the first stars were formed from big clouds of it.

“The SKA will help with so many different parts of astronomy,” said Dr. Shari Breen, who is in charge of the observatory’s science operations.

“The “fast radio bursts” that have been found are one example. In a tiny fraction of a second, these things give off as much energy as the Sun does in a whole year. We don’t know what they are. How could that be? We hope that the SKA will know what to do.”

Small-scale radio astronomy has already been done in the area where the telescope is being built.

To make these sites bigger, though, different land deals had to be made with farmers in the Karoo and the Wajarri Yamaji, who own the land in the Murchison.

Monday’s party to open the SKA was planned by the Wajarri community.

During the ceremonies, different contracts for buying things will be announced.

These will bring the total amount spent on the project to date to just under €500m (£430m). The final construction budget is expected to be €2bn.
The first big step should happen in 2024, when four dishes in Australia and six antenna stations in South Africa are made to work together as a basic telescope. After this “proof-of-principle” moment, the whole array will be put into use.

By 2028, the effective collecting area of the SKA will be just under 500,000 square metres. But the way it is set up makes it possible for it to keep growing, maybe up to the much-wanted one million square metres, or one square kilometre.

This might happen if more and more countries join the organisation and pay the money it needs.

South Africa, Australia, the United Kingdom, China, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Switzerland are all members right now. The treaty has been signed by these countries.

France, Spain, and, most recently, Germany are all on the path to joining the EU.

Canada, India, Sweden, South Korea, and Japan have all said they plan to join at some point in the future.

Prof. Diamond said, “We are also in the process of talking to other countries to see if they are interested in joining the observatory.”

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