Kilometre array update#

Similarly, radio telescopes need areas of ‘radio-quiet’ as they are highly susceptible to interference from things like television, mobile phones and industrial machinery. Optical telescopes must be located well away from the lights of busy cities. Images of the very highest resolution are produced by connecting telescopes across continental scales around the globe, a technique known as Very Long Baseline Interferometry. The signals from each antenna can be electronically combined to imitate a single dish equal in size to the distance between them-the greater the separation, the sharper the image produced. Two or more dishes (antennas) can be linked together to form a telescope known as an interferometer. The receiver detects and amplifies the signals which are processed and stored in a computer ready for analysis. After reaching the dish, radio waves are reflected onto a receiver. A radio telescope uses a large dish (or reflector) to collect the radio waves, and the larger the collecting area (dish) of a telescope, the more sensitive it is-the better it is at detecting faint signals from objects that are a long, long way away. Radio emissions have a longer wavelength than visible light so the telescopes need to be very large to produce sharp images of astronomical objects. Radio waves, like the light waves gathered by optical telescopes, are part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Radio telescopes collect radio waves emitted by objects in space and convert them into pictures astronomers can use to study our Universe. The telescope will see galaxies like our Milky Way half way to the edge of the known universe and will look back in time several billions of years to uncover the origin of the very first stars. From this came the concept of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a project that has drawn together scientists and governments from 20 different countries, and when completed in 2030, will be the world’s biggest radio telescope.ĭescribed as ‘one of the most revolutionary scientific instruments we’ve built in a very long time’, the SKA will be made up of hundreds of dishes and millions of antennas linked by around 80,000 kilometres of fibre optic cables that will feed information into what will most likely be the world’s largest supercomputer. The answer: a radio telescope with a total collecting area of one square kilometre and 50 times the sensitivity of any existing telescope.

Kilometre array update#

In this paper, we provide an update on current efforts to develop a science pipeline that can enable tight constraints on the magnetised large-scale structure of the Universe.Back in the early 1990s astronomers asked themselves what sort of telescope would be needed to investigate the astronomical questions of the new millennium.

The project thereby provides a unique opportunity to contribute to the technological development of the SKA telescope, while simultaneously enabling cutting-edge scientific results. The pipeline uses task-based parallelism to image, detect sources, and perform Faraday Tomography across the entire LOFAR sky. Together with polarization data from the LOFAR Multifrequency Snapshot Sky Survey (MSSS), we have been developing a realistic SKA-like science pipeline that can handle the large data volumes generated by LOFAR at 150 MHz. A critical task for the SKA will be its ability to process data for science, which will need to be conducted by science pipelines. The first phase of the project will generate on the order of 5 zettabytes of data per year. The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will be both the largest radio telescope ever constructed and the largest Big Data project in the known Universe.