Massive radio telescope will search planets for signs of life

Africa and Australasia to share $ 1.9B project

PERTH, Australia — The world’s biggest and most powerful radio telescope, designed to lead the search for life on other planets, will be spread across South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

Members of the Square Kilometre Array ( SKA), a $ 1.9- billion radio telescope that will investigate the greatest mysteries of the universe, made the decision at a meeting in Amsterdam Friday.

Representatives from Britain and the seven other countries overseeing the project agreed to adopt a “dual site” after failing to decide between competing bids from southern Africa and Australasia.

SKA will consist of vast clusters of antennae spread across thousands of kilometres, which can be linked together to form a single telescope measuring 900,000 square metres.

Unlike optical telescopes, which gather light through a lens, SKA will collect radio waves, which reach Earth from outer space.

Radio waves can travel through the dense clouds of dust that gather in space, meaning radio telescopes can “see” much farther into the oldest regions of the universe.

SKA’S size means it will be able to see 10 times farther than existing instruments and be up to 10,000 times more powerful.

Among its tasks will be to examine the clouds of hydrogen gas that formed in the “dark ages” of the early universe.

It also could shed light on mysterious “dark energy,” the force believed to be driving the expansion of the universe at an ever faster rate, and map every pulsar — the collapsing cores of exploding stars — in the galaxy, which would enable scientists to test Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

SKA’S 3,000 dishes may even pick up the simplest traces of intelligent life from distant planets.

Antony Schinckel, from Australia’s science agency, said: “We’ll be able to look for signals that are incredibly weak and that have been emitted over the history of the universe — and we might be able to find signals that are artificial.

“We’ll be seeing if we can work out where we came from, how life evolved on this planet, and whether it might have evolved somewhere else.”

South Africa and Australasia are perfectly suited to radio astronomy because they have vast spaces free of interference from phone and television signals.