Prof. Philip Diamond the SKA Director-General
On Monday the 4th of July at the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) global headquarters in the UK, Prof. Philip Diamond the SKA Director-General announced the addition of a new precursor telescope located in South Africa.
SKA is a large multi radio telescope project primarily being built in South Africa and Australia and is anticipated to be complete by 2025.
Other outstations will be built in Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia; all equipped with radio telescopes contributing to the network. Once complete SKA will be the most advanced radio astronomy array, fifty times more sensitive than any other instrument and ten thousand times faster.
The first telescope to ever be turned towards the heavens was made by Galileo Galilei, with it he was the first to see craters in the moon. Galileo also observed that the Earth and all the other planets circle the sun, he made this observation at a time when celestial bodies were thought to orbit the Earth.
There is no telling what SKA will show us but expectations are plenty. Einstein’s theory of general relativity will be tested, billions of galaxies mapped out to the very edge of the observable universe and the processes leading to the birth and evolution of galaxies will be studied.
Most exciting of all; SKA will be able to look closer at Sun-like stars where Earth-like planets or moons are most likely to have environments favourable for the development of life. This combined with an ability to search for complex organic compounds will make the search for life outside the planet Earth a reality.
These functions outlined on the official SKA website are not exhaustive. A greater appreciation of this technology and the implications it brings comes with a greater understanding of space related sciences. With that in mind Botswana is making preparations to train Batswana scientists, so that when the SKA project is implemented in Botswana in 2023 they will be in a position to make use of the advantages offered by hosting radio telescopes.
In a published press release in April this year the Botswana International University of Science and Technology (BIUST) announced that the institution would host Botswana’s radio-astronomy training facility.
The funding to setup this facility comes from the Newton Fund, an initiative established by the British Council in 2014 to promote economic development and welfare by strengthening science and innovation capacity. Dr. Mhlambululi Mafu in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at BIUST will lead the training facility project.
The new telescope granted precursor status by SKA is the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionisation Array (HERA). Precursors are telescopes located at future SKA sites and serve as a form of prototype for future SKA telescopes.
The scientific goal of HERA is detecting the Epoch of Reionisation signal. Detecting this signal will give insight on many fundamental questions in cosmology, such as properties of the first galaxies, formation of very metal poor stars and many other important research topics in astrophysics which will give a view on what the universe looked like when it was half a billion years old. For now the world continues to watch and to wait, and recall the words of a Roman philosopher named Seneca who lived 2000 years ago.
“The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject... And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them... Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced.”
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