By Gargi Bagchi – Managing Editor, The African Gazette Are you ready to usher in one of the biggest milestones in the history of science and technology? Here comes a breaking news in the field of radio astronomy. For the uninitiated, in radio astronomy – astronomers make use of radio telescopes to study the sky, detecting and amplifying radio waves from space.
According to a recent Forbes article, The Square Kilometer Array Observatory (SKAO) is all set to kick off building humanity’s biggest ever telescopes and related operations and functioning costing $2.2 billion, during the period 2021-2030. This comprises two huge and intricate radio telescope networks in South Africa and Western Australia. The immense project comes after 30 years of wait and long 7 years of detailed designing and complicated engineering efforts by world leading engineers and scientists.
It will entail setting up 197 radio dishes in South Africa’s Karoo in Northern Cape along with building 131,072 antennas in Western Australia’s Murchinson area. This will allow detection of mild radio signals spread across 1 kilometer of collecting area over two continents. Eventually, according to SKA, they will utilize million low-frequency antennas and thousands of dishes to assist astronomers to observe the sky in greater detail and much quickly in comparison to any other system presently available.
Also, the special configuration will allow SKA unparalleled detailing in observations that will exceed the image resolution standard of Hubble Space telescope. Another exclusive feature would be to capture big portions of the skies in parallel – something which again is unprecedented with this degree of sensitivity.
Some of the key scientific goals of SKA include:
Investigating the law of gravity and challenging the theory of general relativity
Revolutionizing the study of galaxies, cosmology – which is the science of the birth and fate of the universe and ‘dark energy’ – the mysterious additional component in the Universe
Opportunities and challenges of cosmic magnetism – their source, how they are and their role in the ever changing Universe
Looking out for other lives and planets through detection of very mild extraterrestrial radio signals.
There are 14 founding member countries of the SKA Project that include UK, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, South Africa, Spain, New Zealand, Italy, India, Germany, France, China, Canada and Australia and about 100 organizations in 20 countries involved in the design and progress of SKA. With the two locations becoming fully operational, up to 710 petabytes of information is anticipated to be produced in this project.
Gargi – Currently Managing Editor of The African Gazette, she has been an independent content creator, researcher and editing professional. With 12+ years of experience across diverse writing genres, Gargi comes with an exposure of working with a multitude of global clients in the digital space. She has a penchant for reading and researching on new topics, and enjoys listening to music and traveling. She can be contacted through Email or Linkedin
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