UK selected as HQ of world's biggest radio telescope

At a meeting held Wednesday, members of the international Square Kilometer Array (SKA) project decided that the permanent headquarter of the world's biggest radio telescope will be located in Britain.

The exact location of the headquarter will be in Jodrell Bank near Manchester, which is also home to the famous 76m Lovell radio dish, according to the SKA.

The SKA will start negotiating with the UK government on the specifics of the plan.

As an ambitious project, the SKA plans to deploy huge fields of antennas in South Africa and Australia to look for answers to some important astronomical questions.

The project's widely dispersed network of antennas will produce a radio telescope with a collecting area of one square km, equivalent to about 200 football pitches.

By using an observatory of this size, astronomers will investigate light sources in the sky that radiate at centimeter to meter wavelengths, achieving sensitivities that are far beyond the reach of current telescopes. Astronomers may also pinpoint the positions of the nearest 100 million galaxies, the structure of which will reveal new details about "dark energy".

The observatory will not be fully functional until 2025. The SKA is an international project upheld by countries like China, Britain, Germany, South Africa and Australia, etc. Endit