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Square Kilometre Array
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is a proposed radio telescope which is intended to have a collecting area of approximately one square kilometre.[1] It is planned to operate at frequencies of 0.10–25 GHz, with a goal of 0.06–35 GHz, and its size will make it 50 times more sensitive than current instruments. It may incorporate multiple independent fields of view, allowing several radio astronomers to observe at once, or to look at different areas of the sky simultaneously. The SKA will create images of distant radio sources using aperture synthesis.
An international consortium is working on the telescope design, to be decided in 2008. The interferometric array is expected to comprise many elements spread over an area of several thousand kilometres, with a compact core of elements containing about half of the collecting area within an area 5 km across, another quarter of the collecting area within 150 km, and the remaining elements spread up to a few thousand kilometres away. The two shortlisted candidates for the siting of the core of the array are at Boolardy in Western Australia, west of Meekatharra, and the Karoo Basin in the Northern Cape area of South Africa, roughly 95 km from Carnarvon.[2] [3] The final decision between these two sites will be made in 2008 or 2009.
Once the site is chosen, construction of the SKA is scheduled to begin in 2010, with initial observations in 2015. It is intended to be fully operational by 2020. It is expected to cost US$1.6bn,[2] and will easily be the most sensitive radio instrument ever conceived, being able to detect every active galactic nucleus (AGN) out to a redshift of 6, when the universe was less than 1 billion years old. It will have the sensitivity to detect Earth-like radio leakage at a distance of several hundred to a few thousand lightyears.
- List of radio telescopes
- LOFAR (the Low Frequency Array, currently under construction in The Netherlands)
- ^ Square Kilometer Array website.
- ^ a b Amos, J. Nations vie for giant telescope, BBC News, 28 September 2006.
- ^ New Address for SKA Project, Science Network WA, 16 February 2007
- "Australia may host Square Kilometre Array", Cosmos magazine, September 2006
- Australian SKA Planning Office Newsletter. CSIRO (10, April 2007). Retrieved on 2007-03-19.