Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy | 2015 Jan 19
An international team of scientists including Hans-Rainer Klöckner from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn and Dominik Schwarz from the University of Bielefeld have joined forces to lay the foundations for an experiment of truly astronomical proportions: putting together the biggest map of the Universe ever made. The experiment will combine signals from hundreds of radio dishes to make cosmic atlas. In a series of papers published today on the arXiv.org astrophysics pre-print website, an international team of researchers set out their plans for the mammoth survey.
Researchers from the Cosmology Science Working Group of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) have worked out how to use the world's largest telescope for the task. "The team has produced an exciting collection of cutting-edge ideas that will help shape the future of cosmology", said Working Group chair Roy Maartens, from the University of Western Cape in South Africa.
The SKA will be a collection of thousands of radio receivers and dishes spread across two sites in South Africa and Western Australia. When the first phase is completed in 2023, the SKA will have a total collecting area equivalent to 15 football pitches, and will produce more data in one day than several times the daily traffic of the entire internet. A second phase, due in the late 2020s, will be ten times larger still. ...
Astronomers preparing to map the Universe with largest radio telescope ever built
Square Kilometer Array Project | 2015 Jan 19
Probing the Universe with the Square Kilometre Array
SKA South Africa Project | 2015 Jan 19
SKA papers published in 2015 on the arXiv.org astrophysics pre-print website