Pulsar observations fine-tune world’s most powerful radio telescope in Murchison ahead of science launch

Astrophysicists are using pulsars — incredibly fast-spinning dead stars — to help prepare one of the world’s biggest low-frequency radio telescopes, located in the Mid West, for early science use. The Square Kilometre Array Observatory and CSIRO have released an early observation, made using a small portion of the SKA-Low telescope — currently under construction in the Murchison at the CSIRO Murchison Radio-Astronomy Observatory — as part of ongoing tests. Dr Shivani Bhandari, SKA-Low commissioning scientist, said the goal was to ensure each part of the telescope was working properly as it grew in size. “SKA-Low is a hugely complex scientific instrument — you can’t just plug it in and expect everything to work perfectly,” she said. “By comparing our pulsar observations with existing data, we can make sure the system is working as intended, and fine-tune it where needed.” SKA-Low is being built using 131,072 antennas across a 74km stretch of outback. It is one of two massive telescopes being developed by the global SKA project — the other is under construction in South Africa. The recently released data comes from the Vela pulsar, one of the brightest and closest pulsars to Earth in the southern sky. These stars act like cosmic clocks, pulsing with precise regularity, and are useful for testing telescope’s accuracy. “These observations are a vital part of the commissioning process because they allow us to test the sensitivity of each station as it comes online,” Dr Bhandari said. SKA-Low is still in its commissioning phase, with about five per cent or 6400 of the full antenna array installed. Scientists are gradually testing and calibrating each antenna station, making sure they work together to form a complete and sensitive telescope. The telescope is set to open to the global scientific community in 2027, even while construction continues. Pulsar data, as well as radio images of galaxies and black holes, are helping scientists fine-tune the system. Once operational, the SKA-Low will tackle some of the biggest questions in astrophysics, including detecting gravitational waves through tiny delays in pulsar signals, and probing the nature of space-time near black holes. “In addition to pulsar observations, we are also using the telescope in its imaging mode to observe radio emission from distant galaxies containing supermassive black holes,” Dr George Heald, SKA-Low lead commissioning scientist, said. “The brightest of these objects can be used to understand how we will calibrate the complete system to make the exquisite images that SKA-Low will be capable of generating. “As the telescope increases in scale, our commissioning tests will also get more complex and lead to the validation of specific observing modes for use in the Science Verification process.”

Pulsar observations fine-tune world’s most powerful radio telescope in Murchison ahead of science launch

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