The University of Western Australia
The two billion dollar Square Kilometre Array project, commonly referred to as SKA, will be the world's largest ground-based telescope array.
To support Australia’s bid to host the SKA, The University of Western Australia has established an International Centre for Radio Astronomy, a joint venture with Curtin University.
The new radio telescope will be capable of seeing the early stages of the formation of galaxies, stars and planets.
Professor Peter Quinn, Premiers Fellow at The University of Western Australia, has already worked with the European Southern Observatory to build the world's largest optical telescope in Chile. Now, with another Premiers Fellow, Professor Lister Staveley-Smith, he's helping the Australian SKA Coordination Committee to prepare the Australian bid for the SKA site which will generate enormous business opportunities.
In a remote area north-east of Geraldton, a team is developing technology for the SKA Pathfinder telescope which will put Australia in a strong position to be chosen as the site for the core SKA project.
If Australia is chosen, the project will build 4000 radio astronomy dishes spread across the nation.
Origins of the universe
The SKA will enable scientists to look back in time to the origin of the universe.
Already, our telescopes have probed back to a period when the universe was about one-tenth of its current age when stars, planets and galaxies were already formed. Now the SKA will help us understand how they were formed by probing a time when the universe consisted of only a dark void of hydrogen gas.
To capture this moment, the SKA telescope will pick up the weak signals coming from hydrogen gas emitted at a time when the universe was in the first one per cent of its life. It will have a collecting area of around one million square metres, about 50 times larger than anything that exists today.
The radio signals will reach the Earth in the FM part of the radio spectrum which is saturated with man-made signals over most of the Earth's inhabited regions. Australia's bid will stress that WA's Midwest is the most "radio quiet" region on Earth, yet it's still accessible to astronomers and engineers from around the world.
The vast extent of the Australia continent also allows for the positioning of dishes over the thousands of kilometres needed to discovery the sources of the first light.