14 DAY TRIAL // A new collaboration between astronomical institutions in New Zealand and Australia sees the creation of one of the largest interferometry-based radio telescopes in the world. No less than six facilities across the two countries signed a cooperation agreement, which essentially links these individual stations into a single, massive observatory. The maximum distance between any two of the six telescopes is about 5,500 kilometers, which makes it the second-largest in the world. The top spot goes to the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) observatory in the US, which boasts a distance of 8,611 kilometers between any two of its ten dishes.
The new instrument is the result of an agreement signed by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) and the Curtin University of Technology International Center for Radio Astronomy Research, in Australia, and the AUT University in New Zealand. Scientists with the project say that the quality of the images that will be obtained using this setup will be about ten times better than that of pictures snapped using the famous Hubble Space Telescope. They base their claims on photos the radio telescope captured of the central regions in the galaxy Centaurus A, which is located about 14 million light-years away from Earth.
There is also another reason for this collaboration. By overcoming the immense engineering challenges associated with such a link-up, Australia and New Zealand have proven that they have what it takes to ensure to proper operation of the planned Square Kilometer Array (SKA) telescope, which is an international project still looking for a construction site. “The SKA is a truly mega-sized science project with its global reach, scale and ambition, akin to the Large Hadron Collider in Europe. This successful linking of antennas shows Australia and New Zealand's commitment to next-generation astronomical research and how seriously we are taking the SKA bid,” says Dr Brian Boyle, who is the CSIRO SKA director.
“Centaurus A is 14 million light-years away. We're zooming in on the black hole at the heart of this galaxy, to learn about how these systems work. Making the new image has been like photographing a pin head from 20 [kilometers] away,” adds radio astronomy expert Steven Tingay, who is also a professor at the Curtin University. He is a part of the team operating the newly-formed observatory. If the initiative manages to sway the SKA builders – who need to decide on a site by 2012 – then the thousands of antennas that will make up the observatory could make their way to the two countries. The total investment value for SKA is $2.5 billion.