Bernard Lane | February 18, 2009
"I'M an astronomer," Brian Boyle says.
"You expect me to give you an astronomical number. Five million million million (bytes); that's the amount of information that's been spoken by humanity over its entire history.
"It's also the amount of information that will be generated by the SKA in its first full day of operation."
SKA is not a catchy name for a telescope, unlike the Dish at Parkes, NSW, immortalised in film. But those three workmanlike letters stand for the most powerful radio telescope: the Square Kilometre Array.
This month Boyle, a Scottish-born scientist with the CSIRO, took up a new job as Australia's SKA champion.
There is a competition in play: Australia against South Africa as short-listed hosts for the vast array of antenna dishes that will make up the square kilometre collecting area of the SKA.
But at its core the SKA is a collaboration: a $2 billion global venture that links science, government and industry, notably experts in information technology who are being relied on to conjure up the computing spirit necessary. Boyle explains: "We can't build the SKA today, we know we can't. We don't have the processing power. We have to build tomorrow's telescope with tomorrow's technology."
If the SKA is a hypothetical telescope, a networked array rather than a great iconic dish, it nonetheless fires the imagination and evokes wonder.
"Who wouldn't get excited about the potential to discover the first stars in the universe, to prove Einstein wrong (about gravity)?" Boyle says.
"(But) I think the most important thing that the SKA will discover is something that we can't even possibly imagine rightnow.
"The Hubble space telescope went up ostensibly to measure the expansion of the universe. Now, it didn't really.
"By using the Hubble deep field, it identified the most distant galaxies that had ever been seen and was able to piece together the early phases of cosmic evolution. That was entirely unexpected.
"I'm hoping the SKA will give us a whole new class of astronomical objects or physical phenomena or provide us with that sort of eureka moment in the universe when you go: 'Oh, it's like that!"'
Back on Earth, Australia hopes to have an SKA pathfinder telescope at work by 2011-12 in the remote Murchison region of Western Australia, the candidate site for the SKA itself. (The SKA site is to be chosen in 2012 and construction will start four years later.)
Boyle's people at the CSIRO Australia Telescope National Facility recently let the astronomy world know that the new pathfinder would soon be open for business.
The response was staggering.
"We received sufficient applications to allocate the pathfinder for 24 years, from 350 distinct astronomers from 10 different countries," Boyle says.
"And this is for a telescope which is essentially only 1 per cent of the collecting area of the full SKA."