Some of the world's most accomplished astronomers will be descending on the island tomorrow to discuss the planned Square Kilometre Array (SKA), an EU project to design the world's largest radio astronomical instrument.
Once built, the telescope will provide the most rigorous tests of general relativity, measure the properties of every single galaxy in the entire universe and investigate the possibility of life beyond the solar system.
This international effort includes partners from 26 institutes in 13 countries. One of the partners is Oxford University, whose design team for the project is coordinated by a Maltese scientist, Kristian Zarb Adami, a lecturer at the University of Malta and holder of a post-doctoral fellowship at Oxford.
The aim of the team in Oxford is to bring the concept of systems such as those developed for mobile phones to the radio astronomy world.
Current estimates for the cost of the project hover around the €1.5 billion mark, apart from running costs expected to top €100 million a year.
The SKA will have a radio wave-collecting area equivalent to a million square metres, making it 30 times more sensitive and 10,000 times faster than any other radio telescope in the world.
The telescope will be built using millions of antennae combined to form a "radio wide angle lens" that can constantly monitor the sky. But due to the inherent sensitive nature of the instrument, the telescope will have to be located in a remote location as far away as possible from human-generated interference, such as television and radio stations. Two regions are being mentioned for hosting the telescope: the Western Australian desert and the South African Karoo desert.
The old University building in Valletta will tomorrow and on Friday host the leading scientists and engineers partaking in the SKA project where they will discuss the future of the telescope before the next phase of EU funding goes on line in June.
Dr Zarb Adami said the meeting will be instrumental in determining the subsequent design directions of such a telescope and to ensure Europe is at the helm of the next stages of the development.
Through his position at Oxford and support from Charles Sammut from the University of Malta, Dr Zarb Adami invited students from Malta to join him in Oxford for summer projects with the aim of eventually having five Maltese students from the engineering, ICT and science faculties reading their doctorate as joint degrees between Oxford Astrophysics and the University of Malta.