Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO)

The Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO) Council held its maiden meeting recently among organisations from ten countries  like Australia, Canada, China, India, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden, the Netherlands and the UK and they approved the establishment of the world’s largest radio telescope.

• SKAO is a new intergovernmental organisation dedicated to radio astronomy and is headquartered in the UK.

• Unlike optical telescopes, radio telescopes can detect invisible gas and, therefore, they can reveal areas of space that may be obscured by cosmic dust.
• Since the first radio signals were detected by physicist Karl Jansky in the 1930s, astronomers have used radio telescopes to detect radio waves emitted by different objects in the universe and explore it.
• The Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, which was the second-largest single-dish radio telescope in the world, collapsed in December 2020.
• The telescope was built in 1963 and because of its powerful radar, scientists employed it to observe planets, asteroids and the ionosphere, making several discoveries over the decades, including finding prebiotic molecules in distant galaxies, the first exoplanets, and the first-millisecond pulsar.

• The telescope, proposed to be the largest radio telescope in the world, will be located in Africa and Australia whose operation, maintenance and construction will be overseen by SKAO.
• The completion is expected to take nearly a decade at a cost of over £1.8 billion.
• It will tell the beginning of the universe, how and when the first stars were born, the life-cycle of a galaxy, exploring the possibility of detecting technologically-active civilisations elsewhere in our galaxy and understanding where gravitational waves come from.
• Telescope will accomplish NASA’s scientific goals by measuring neutral hydrogen over cosmic time, accurately timing the signals from pulsars in the Milky Way, and detecting millions of galaxies out to high redshifts.