Top scientists from eight different countries are meeting in Malta this week to create the software enabling the world’s largest radio telescope to detect every single galaxy in the universe.
Engineers and astronomers will be discussing the design of the best telescope that can deliver the requirements of the second phase of the telescope — the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).
The two-day event at the University of Malta Valletta campus starts on Monday and is being led by Kristian Zarb Adami, an astrophysicist with the University of Oxford and the Institute of Space Sciences and Astronomy (ISSA) at the University of Malta.
“Malta will be playing a very important role and, thanks to funding from the Malta Council for Science and Technology and the Malta Communications Authority, our team will be developing the real-time software and system that produces images from the telescope,” Prof. Zarb Adami said.
Maltese scientists officially joined the global team in 2015. In 2017, they announced that they had finalised a prototype radio telescope that would be used as part of the SKA.
What will the telescope be used for?
Spanning three continents and tapping the brains of over 1,000 scientists from 20 countries, the telescope seeks to discover how the first stars formed in the universe, shed light on whether intelligent life has developed on other planets and subject Einstein’s theory of relativity to its most stringent test to date.
As part of the project, last March scientists created the SKA Observatory, a global intergovernmental body that will oversee and operate the gigantic Square Kilometre Array.
They are now moving on to the second phase — SKA-2 — and the concept is inching close to reality.
What will the scientists do in Malta?
This two-day meeting in Malta will focus on the telescope’s Mid-Frequency Aperture Array, which is the most challenging part of SKA-2 due to its sheer scale.
An aperture array is a large number of small, fixed antenna elements that can provide a large field of view and are capable of observing more than one part of the sky at once.
Once construction is completed in 2030, the telescope will be the largest aperture array ever built with approximately 100 million antennas, costing in the region of €1 billion.
“This will be the largest data machine in the world producing more than the entire internet traffic in one day. The SKA will open a new window on our universe and revolutionise how we understand the world around us,” Prof. Zarb Adami said.