AUSTRALIAN FRONTIERS OF SCIENCE, 2008
The Shine Dome, Canberra, 21-22 February
Session 1: Understanding the universe with next generation radio telescopes
Chair: Professor Anne Green
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Anne Green is a radio astronomer whose main research focus is the study of the structure and ecology of the Milky Way Galaxy with particular interest in supernova remnants, the relics of exploded stars. She was Director of the Molonglo Observatory for ten years and is now Head of the School of Physics and Director of the Science Foundation for Physics within the University of Sydney. Professor Green is a graduate of both Melbourne and Sydney Universities and held an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Max-Planck-Institut for Radioastronomie in Bonn, Germany, before retiring from academia to travel Europe, live in Belgium and Switzerland and have two children. After a return to Sydney and fifteen years away from astronomy, she resumed her research career. She is also leader of the SKA Molonglo Prototype (SKAMP) project, which is prototyping technology and undertaking science projects as a forerunner to an amazing new telescope for the future called the Square Kilometre Array. |
This first session is on astronomy, particularly radio astronomy, which is my field. The session has the grand title 'Understanding the universe with next generation radio telescopes', and the particular radio telescope that has us all very excited is the Square Kilometre Array, or SKA. This project was born globally, so there are 17 countries in a consortium and over 50 institutions, and Australia has been a part of this project right from the very beginning.
So what is the Square Kilometre Array, the SKA? I don't want to pre-empt any of the science and exciting things that the next two speakers will talk about, but I just want to set the scene. It is called the Square Kilometre Array because it has a one square kilometre of collecting area you don't need to be a brain surgeon or whatever to know that and what that means is a million square metres, so it is pretty big. It is 100 hundred times more powerful than any of the existing facilities, and it will be not just one single telescope (that would be prohibitively expensive); it is at least 4000 smaller antennas. And they won't be distributed close together 50 per cent of them will be clustered in a core, and the rest of the 50 per cent are likely to be spread over at least 3000 kilometres. It is a very interesting and very challenging telescope to build, and both of the speakers will talk about different aspects of the power of this very flexible telescope.
Where is it going to be built? There are two sites which are being considered, and the decision will be made in a couple of years. Australia is one of the sites, and we hope it will be in the Murchison Shire, in Western Australia. The other site is Southern Africa South Africa and five other countries. The requirements for this telescope are basically no people, lots of access to power and amazing data transportability. This will be producing terabytes of data in a very short time, and that is a challenge: to get a lot of power, megawatts of power, a lot of data access, and no people, in one place that also has a stable ionosphere and a stratosphere and various other physical requirements, is a challenge.
So, instead of our starting just to build this from scratch, there are precursor instruments which are being built to test the technologies and also to examine some of the key science projects. The next two speakers, Dr Naomi McClure Griffiths and Professor Steven Tingay, both outstanding young astronomers, will be talking about the SKA and the capabilities of these precursor instruments.
