Britain has been chosen to host the permanent headquarters for the world’s largest radio telescope, an observatory that aims to delve deep into the early history of the universe.
Members of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project decided on Wednesday that the Jodrell Bank site near Manchester would become the full-time home for the telescope’s operational centre, despite an impressive Italian counter-bid.
Rather than employing one enormous dish, the SKA will draw on more than one hundred thousand dishes and antennae spread across Africa and Australia to create a collecting area of one square kilometre. Construction is due to begin in 2018.
“It’s great news. It’s another step along the way to constructing the telescope. We now have a secure commitment from the British government for their share of the first phase of SKA construction and operation,” said Philip Diamond, director general of the SKA organisation. Totalling £200m, the UK funds come from the government, the University of Manchester and Cheshire East council.
The challenge for project’s engineers is to build a radio telescope that is tens of times more sensitive and hundreds of times faster at mapping the heavens than today’s best observatories.
The telescope will be powerful enough to pick up extremely faint radio signals that were emitted from cosmic sources more than 13 billion years ago, when the first stars and galaxies began to form.
Astronomers hope that the vast telescope will help to answer some of the toughest questions of the universe, such as how did the cosmos form and evolve; what is the invisible dark matter that seems to cling around galaxies; and what is dark energy, the mysterious force that appears to drive the universe outwards?
The project has been operating from the Jodrell Bank Observatory on a temporary basis, but yesterday’s decision to make the Cheshire site the permanent headquarters is an important boost for the region. The telescope is expected to operate for 50 years.
The telescope will generate data at an extraordinary rate. In its first phase, scientists anticipate 160 terabytes of raw data per second coming from the machine, the equivalent of more than 35,000 DVDs every second.
