NZ to find galaxy secrets
NEW Zealand will be one of the hosts of the world’s largest radio telescope – a $2.5 billion project designed to uncover secrets of the universe such as the existence of intelligent alien life.
The Square Kilometre Array will be spread across New Zealand, Australia and South Africa, and when it is finished, will be made up of 3000 dishes, each 15 metres wide with a receiver surface area of one square kilometre.
It will have 50 times the sensitivity, and 10,000 times the survey speed of the best present-day radio telescopes.
Five of the eight nations belonging to the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Organisation (Canada, China, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom) voted on the decision on Friday in Amsterdam.
New Zealand and Australia had put forward a joint bid in competition with a bid from South Africa. It was expected there would be only one outright winner and the South African bid was emerging the favourite. The nations that put forward a bid did not vote.
The SKA will be one of the biggest science projects ever undertaken and SKA Organisation interim director Dr Michiel van Haarlem said it was expected to be able to show scientists what happened in the moments directly after the Big Bang.
The SKA’S colossal field of antennas will sweep the sky, testing Einstein’s theory of gravity, even searching for intelligent alien life forms. The data transmitted back to Earth in a single day is said to take about two million years to play back on an ipod, and the telescope itself will have a combined collecting area of more than 1 million sqm.
In choosing the three countries as the joint sites, the committee had to be sure of space which would allow for the long-term sustainability of a ‘‘radio quiet zone’’ with minimal radio interference.
SKA board chairman Professor John Womersley said the decision to use both the South African and Australasian sites would increase the costs and complexity of the project, the Daily Mail reported.
He said its targets would be radio sources in the sky that radiate at centimetre to metre wavelengths.
These included the clouds of hydrogen gas in the infant universe that collapsed to form the first stars and galaxies.
The SKA would map the positions of the nearest billion galaxies. The structure they traced on the cosmos should also reveal new details about ‘‘ dark energy’’, the mysterious negative pressure that appears to be pushing the universe apart at a rapid speed.
Peter Quinn, of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research in Western Australia, said he was pleased the project was split between the three countries.
‘‘It means that we’ll be the centre of attention for major scientific infrastructure, major breakthroughs in science, so it produces something in Australia which we’ve never had before.’’
South Africa’s site is in the Northern Cape, while the Australasian sites will be in Western Australia and the top of the South Island.