Testing Theories of Existence

New Zealand and Australia are working together to build the most powerful radio telescope ever constructed, the $2 billion Square Kilometre Array (SKA). The international consortium behind the project — 67 organisations in 20 countries — hopes the SKA will help humanity answer two of its most puzzling questions — how the universe was formed after the Big Bang and do we share it with other beings? The square kilometre in SKA refers to the combined data-collecting area of the 3000 radio antennas — each with a 15m diameter dish — located at sites that would stretch 5500km across the Australian outback and New Zealand. All antennas would be linked by fibre-optics to a supercomputer in Perth that would have to process a million trillion operations a second — a speed known as an exaflop. That computer speed does not yet exist. Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) astronomer Brian Boyle said the SKA would be used to try to form a full physical history of the universe. “It will test fundamental physical theories. The theories of Einstein, the nature of gravity,” Boyle said. Production of the SKA would begin in 2016 and the first data would be collected in 2020.