After 30 years of planning, construction of the SKA Telescope, set to be the world's largest telescope array, began in South Africa on December 5.
The Square Kilometre Array , which will contain hundreds of radio antennae spread across two continents, is now under construction in both South Africa's Karoo region and Western Australia's Murchison Shire.
"The SKA project has been many years in the making," SKAO council chair Catherine Cesarsky said in an address at the South Africa site Monday ."Today, we gather here to mark another important chapter in this 30-year journey that we've been on together. A journey to deliver the world's largest scientific instrument."
The Australia site will host 131,072 low-frequency antennae placed as far as 40.4 miles apart. Together, they'll act as a radio telescope with a lens spanning nearly 100 acres . Each antenna station is 6.6 feet tall and contains 256 antennae in a configuration that looks a bit like a pine tree. By catching very-low-frequency signals from the whole sky, SKA-Low will be able to delve into some of the oldest echoes left over from the first billion years of the universe, according to SKAO.
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