The world's largest radio telescope in your backyard (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)

Presented by Dr. Tyler Bourke on 24th March 2017.

Australia is part of an international effort to build the World's largest radio telescope, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). In fact, one of the two telescope arrays that make up the SKA will be built in the Western Australian outback near Murchison, about 800 km NNE of Perth, a remote area almost devoid of people, but already the location of two advanced radio telescopes. The other SKA telescope array will be in a similarly isolated location in South Africa. The telescopes of the SKA will provide more than an order-of-magnitude increase in performance over existing radio telescopes, to for example: address fundamental questions on the history of our Universe and the emergence of the first stars and galaxies ; detect the merger of super-massive black-holes at the centres of galaxies through their gravitational waves, and use these events to test Einstein's theories ; detect powerful bursts of radio emission whose origin and nature remain controversial.