S. Africa, Australasia to host world’s biggest radio telescope
South Africa, Australia and New Zealand will host the world’s
biggest radio telescope capable of surveying the sky more than
ten thousand times faster than before. The three countries
provide the best location for the 1.5bn-euro Square Kilometre
Array (SKA) since they afford the best view of the Milky Way and
host the least radio interference. The radio telescope will
probe the early Universe, test Einstein's theory of gravity and
search for alien intelligent life. The SKA will combine the
signals received by thousands of small antennas spread over a
distance of more than 3,000 km and create a superscope with
remarkable sensitivity and resolution. It will target radio
sources in the sky that radiate at centimeter to meter
wavelengths such as clouds of hydrogen gas in the infant
Universe that collapsed to form the very first stars and
galaxies. Mapping the positions of the nearest galaxies,
gathering new data on ‘dark energy’, and detailing the inf