SKA Super Telescope To Be Located Across South Africa, Australia And New Zealand.

Artists impression of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope project Photo: Reuters

Australia And South Africa To Share SKA Super Telescope -- The Telegraph

The world's biggest and most powerful radio telescope will be spread across South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

Members of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a £1.2 billion radio telescope which will probe the greatest mysteries of the Universe and lead the search for life on other planets, took the decision at a meeting in Amsterdam on Friday.

Representatives from Britain and the seven other states overseeing the project agreed to adopt a "dual site" after failing to decide between competing bids from Southern Africa and Australasia.

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My Comment: I am surprised by the South African choice .... I expected Chile.

Radio Telescope Will Be Powered by $43-Million IBM Supercomputer

Radio Telescope Square Kilometer Array Will Be Powered by $43-Million IBM Supercomputer -- Sci Tech Daily

The world’s largest telescope will be the Square Kilometer Array, and when it starts peering into radio waves emanating from the skies, it will generate 1,000,000 terabytes of data each day. All of this data needs to be processed, and IBM is building a supercomputer to handle it.

1,000,000 terabytes, or one exabyte, is a lot of information, and it will be generated by 15,000 small antennas and 77 larger stations. The main focus of the Square Kilometer Array is to shed light on the origins of the Big Bang. One exabyte a day, that’s twice as much information as there is traffic on the Internet each day.

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My Comment: I can see the line-up of radio astronomers waiting to get their hands on the data from this project.

Mysterious Radio Waves Emitted From Nearby Galaxy

Something in there is producing an unusually regular radio signal
(Image: NASA/ESA/STScI/AURA)

From New Scientist:

There is something strange in the cosmic neighbourhood. An unknown object in the nearby galaxy M82 has started sending out radio waves, and the emission does not look like anything seen anywhere in the universe before.

"We don't know what it is," says co-discoverer Tom Muxlow of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics near Macclesfield, UK.

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Visionary Who Designed World's Biggest Radio Telescope, Dies Aged 92

Dr Gordon's 1,000ft radio telescope has been the forefront of scientific discovery

From The Daily Mail:

An engineer who designed the telescope that discovered the first planets beyond our solar system has died aged 92.

William Gordon was a visionary whose atmospheric work laid the foundation for current studies of satellite communication, space weather, and GPS.

He is probably best known for his role in getting the Arecibo Observatory up and running in the late 1950s.

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Simply Astronomical – The Square Kilometre Array

Low-frequency receiving tiles will be surrounded by high-frequency receiving dishes
(Image: SKA Project Office/Xilostudios)

From NOVA:

ustralia is playing a leading part in plans to build the world’s largest radio telescope.

Australia is in the running to host a giant new radio telescope, the astronomical equivalent to the Large Hadron Collider which has been called the biggest science experiment in history.

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope will be too complex and costly (A$2.9 billion) to be built by any one country. Instead an international consortium of 19 countries has been formed to plan and build it. In October 2006, the consortium announced that two countries had been short listed to host the SKA – Australia and South Africa.

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TV Switch-Over Triggers Rush To See Rare Stars

The skies are ours, for now: the Arecibo Observatory has a window of opportunity to view the sky at frequencies previously masked by TV (Image: Seth Shostak/SPL)

From New Scientist:

US SKIES are clearer than usual after the switch in June from analogue to digital TV freed up a chunk of the radio spectrum. Astronomers are now rushing to see what they can find before transmissions from cellphone companies and others fill the space.

Prior to the switch-over, naturally occurring radio waves at frequencies between 700 and 800 megahertz were obscured by analogue TV signals, preventing astronomers from investigating the universe using this band. Now a receiver has been installed at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to take advantage of the new-found clarity.

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How To Truck 66 200,000-Pound Antennas To 16,000 Feet

From Wired Science:

After a 17-mile trek up to a plateau in the Chilean Andes, scientists installed the first of 66 giant antennae on the European Southern Observatory’s Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope this week.

The antenna, which weighs about 100 tons and measures 40 feet in diameter, was carried to its operations site at 16,400 feet by a massive, custom-built transporter. Eventually, the antenna will be linked with dozens of others to form a single, enormous telescope. Scientists hope the extremely dry air on the Chajnantor Plateau will help ALMA study some of the coldest and most distant objects in the observable universe.

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East Asia Builds World's Largest Radio Telescope Network

Credit: Landscape photo of the Very Large Array antenna with the moon. Credit: NRAO

From China View:

SHANGHAI, Feb.1 (Xinhua) -- East Asian astronomers are building the world's largest radio telescope array to see the deep into the galaxy and black holes and more accurately determine the orbits of lunar probes such as China's Chang'e-1.

The array, called the East Asia Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) consortium, consists of 19 radio telescopes from China, Japan and the Republic of Korea (ROK) that cover an area with a diameter of 6,000 kilometers from northern Japan's Hokkaido to western China's Kunming and Urumqi.

The VLBI technology is widely used in radio astronomy. It combines the observations simultaneously made by several telescopes to expand the diameter and increase magnification.

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