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.
What is the SKA?
In the early 1990s astronomers posed the question: What sort of telescope will we need to investigate the astronomical questions of the new millennium? The answer: A radio telescope with 50 times the sensitivity of any existing telescope and with a total collecting area of one square kilometre, hence the name (Box 1: What is a radio telescope?).
The SKA will not be a single instrument but will consist of several thousand antennas all linked together to form one giant array. The design currently favoured for the array consists of many small dish antennas approximately 10 metres in diameter, and a large number of a new type of flat panel known as an aperture array or 'tile'. The dishes will receive high frequency radio waves and the tiles low frequencies, giving the SKA an exceptionally wide radio 'window' to observe the universe.
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