How does it work?
/ More InfoLots of dishes
When built, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is going to be world’s biggest radio telescope. But that’s not quite the whole story because it’s not really one telescope.
To listen to things further and further away from Earth, scientists around the world have built bigger and bigger dishes on their radio telescopes. Some of the biggest so far include:
They’re huge! Standing in a line, it would take nearly 1 000 people to span Arecibo - the biggest dish so far. With the SKA, we’re going to do something different: we’re going to build an array of thousands of small ones.
When the Arecibo radio telescope was built, bigger was better, but now we can take a load of small dishes and use computers to hook them all together so that they work as though they were one giant one.
Lots of telescopes hooked together make... an array of telescopes! (Bet our “Square Kilometre Array” name makes more sense now!)
Some of the reasons we want to make an array instead of a single super enormous dish include:
- each dish is (relatively) cheap to build
- we can combine the information from each dish to see in much finer detail
- we can make the telescope bigger later by adding more dishes
- we can look at more than one thing at once by using parts of the telescope separately
- we can look at more of the sky at once, so can cover the whole sky more quickly
- if one dish breaks, we can fix it while still using all the others
With SKA’s array of thousands of dishes, we’ll have the the biggest and most sensitive radio telescope ever built, able to see more of the Universe than has ever been seen before. We think it’ll be pretty cool. What do you think?