Telescope: SA a front-runner

2006-09-28 15:01

Paris - Australia and Southern Africa have been shortlisted in the contest to host the world's mightiest telescope, a billion-dollar initiative gathering 17 countries, it was announced on Thursday.

"Both Australia and Southern Africa can meet the full range of requirements for the SKA," the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope, project director Richard Schilizzi said.

Compared with past-generation telescopes which were a single, massive dish to pick up radio emissions from space, the SKA will comprise thousands of smaller dishes spread over 3 ,000 kilometres and a central collecting area five kilometres across.

It is designed to be 50 times more sensitive than today's most powerful radio telescopes.

Astronomers hope it will pick up radio waves which issued from the formation of the first stars and galaxies after the "Big Bang" that created the Universe.

It will also trace the effects of the so-called dark energy that is driving the Universe apart, look for the effects of gravitational waves from black holes at the centres of galaxies and hunt for Earth-like planets orbiting other stars.

Australia's bid puts the core site at Mileura station, about 100 kilometres west of Meekathara in Western Australia. Other dishes would be distributed across the country, with the possibility of an extension into New Zealand.

Sparsely populated areas

In Southern Africa, the central location would be in the Karoo, in South Africa's Northern Cape region, 95kms from Carnavon. Other dishes would be located in Botswana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia and Ghana.

China and Argentina/Brazil had also put in strong bids, but were ruled out, the SKA said.

China had placed "unacceptable restrictions" on the placement of the core site, it said without elaborating.

The joint Argentinian-Brazilian proposal was nixed because low-frequency signals from space would be disrupted by ionospheric conditions above South America.

The SKA's core site has to be placed in sparsely populated areas as man-made radio signals can mask the faint radio waves from the distant cosmos that its forest of dishes is designed to detect.

The decision about which bid will win the SKA beauty contest will be made "towards the end of the decade", the project said.

The scheme is being decided by the International SKA Steering Committee, a consortium of nearly three dozen institutes that have agreed to share the research and development costs.

The United States had also put in a bid to host the SKA, but withdrew it.

On the net:

www.skatelescope.org

- AFP