Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, December 6 (Xinhua)-- the world's largest radio telescope, the Square kilometer Array Observatory (Square Kilometer Array Observatory,SKAO), broke ground today, including the SKA-Mid array in the Carous Desert in South Africa and the the SKA-Low array north of Perth, Western Australia.

This is a series of radio telescope clusters covering an area of one square kilometer, built and operated by the intergovernmental international organization SKAO, and jointly funded by 16 countries, including China. Prior to this, it has gone through 30 years of preparatory work and a year and a half of preparatory work.

Catherine Cesarsky, chairman of the SKAO Council, attended the groundbreaking ceremony of the South African base today. "the SKAO project has been brewing for many years, and we are here today to commemorate another important chapter in our 30-year journey together," he said. "after 18 months of intense activity, we finally started building SKA."

Wang Zhigang, China's minister of science and technology, said that science knows no national boundaries and innovation is endless. As an important carrier for strengthening international scientific and technological cooperation and deepening bilateral and multilateral intergovernmental exchanges, large-scale international scientific projects are important tools for human beings to promote the frontiers of knowledge, explore unknown areas and solve major global problems. SKA Telescope is a large international scientific project which integrates radio astronomy, physics, mathematics and modeling, communication technology, big data and other basic science and cutting-edge technology, which provides a great opportunity for human beings to better understand the universe. China will continue to fulfill its commitments and contribute wisdom and strength to the SKA project. China is willing to join hands with all participating countries to carry out global cooperation to build, deliver and share the world's largest synthetic aperture radio telescope, explore the vast universe and create a better future for mankind.

CTOnews.com learned that the "SKA" telescope would contain a large array of radio receivers. These arrays are located in South Africa and Australia. The resolution and sensitivity of the array, as well as excellent computational support, will help astronomers solve some of the most fundamental problems in physics today.

SKA is the world's largest synthetic aperture array radio telescope in the international astronomical community in the next 50 years, which is about 100 times more sensitive and 10000 times faster than the current largest array radio telescope, thus helping astronomers to detect signals from the deepest parts of the universe.

For example, the SKA-Mid array in Carous will use 197antennas 15m in diameter to scan the sky for radio sources in the if range of 350MHz to 15.4GHz, while the Australian SKA-Low array will rely on 131072 dipole antennas to detect radio waves at frequencies between 50 and 350MHz.

"SKA telescopes will really revolutionize our understanding of the universe," Cesarsky said. "they will enable us to study its evolution and some of its most mysterious phenomena in unprecedented detail, which is really exciting for the scientific community."

According to the SKAO statement, the first two antenna stations will be completed in May 2023, and the latter will be installed in April 2024, followed by three to four more antenna stations each month.

After its completion and operation, SKA will have the opportunity to reveal the most basic scientific problems in the universe, especially how the first generation of celestial bodies are formed, the formation and evolution of galaxies, the properties of dark energy, the cosmic magnetic field, the nature of gravity, life molecules and extraterrestrial civilization, and so on. The breakthrough of any one of these problems will be a major change in natural science.

SKAO is headquartered in the United Kingdom, and its full members currently include Australia, China, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, South Africa and the United Kingdom, as well as Canada, France, Germany, India, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland to participate in SKAO as observers.

The 16 members of SKAO jointly contributed $1.55 billion to build the series of telescopes and provided $830 million for the first decade of operation. SKAO has signed more than 40 contracts worth more than $157 million in the past 18 months and announced an additional deal worth $315 million at Monday's ceremony. The telescope will serve astronomers around the world for at least 50 years.

In the preparatory stage of construction, more than 100 scientific research institutes from about 20 countries around the world participated in the design and development of SKA.

As an important participant in SKA, China joined with advantageous scientific research institutions from Australia, Italy, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Canada and other countries to participate in the engineering design and R & D of seven international work package alliances in the preparatory phase. After years of technical research, China's R & D team put forward the design scheme of the first phase of SKA reflector antenna, signal and data transmission and other work packages and was adopted. In 2017, he was elected chairman of the International Reflector Antenna working package Alliance, presided over core technology research and development, and completed the construction of the first reflector antenna prototype.

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