Australia, South Africa build super telescopes

Square Kilometer Array (SKA), a joint scientific project of more than 20 countries, aims to create the world's largest radio telescope, announcing on May 25 that South Africa and Australia will share locations. to build this huge telescope system.

'We agreed to build at two locations. We will install equipment in both Australia and South Africa so they can form a global observation network, ' said SKA president John Womersley in a press conference held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

According to the design, SKA has an antenna network of up to 1 km ² , which is 200 times more than the largest Lovell space telescope currently owned by Manchester University (UK). It is predicted to be 10,000 times better at detecting than any modern radio telescope currently in use. Scientists expect SKA to reveal light on the fundamental questions of the universe, like how it came about, why it continues to expand and whether there is any life beyond its Earth. me or not.

Both South Africa and Australia competed with each other to win a $ 2 billion contract to build the SKA radio telescope system. However, the project management decided to choose both places, which Womersley explained is to 'make the best use of the large investments that the two countries have poured into astronomy'.