South Africa's MeerKAT. (Supplied)
Australia's Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), which came online on Tuesday, forms the first part of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), which will be the largest radio telescope in the world. South Africa and Australia will share the €2-billion SKA, with antennas – focusing on different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum – in both countries.
The MWA is a low frequency array and "will … [enable scientists] to look far into the past by studying radio waves that are more than 13-billion years old", Curtin University, which led the project, said on Tuesday. The MWA is located in the Shire of Murchison in Western Australia, which is the size of the Netherlands and has a population of fewer than 200 people.
The $51-million MWA – nine years in the building and commissioning – would also monitor the sun for solar flares and space debris, the university said. Solar flares disrupt communications signals and GPS and damage satellites. This year is the sun solar maximum, meaning that the sun will be more active, with more flares than usual.
"Given the quality of the data obtained during the commissioning process and the vast areas of study that will be investigated, we are expecting to see preliminary results in as little as three months' time," Steven Tingay, director of the MWA and professor of radio astronomy at Curtin University, said.
"This is an exciting prospect for anyone who's ever looked up at the sky and wondered how the universe came to be … The MWA has and will continue to lift the bar even higher for the SKA."
South Africa's precursor telescope, the 64-dish MeerKAT, will only come online in 2016, with its first dish to be erected later this year.
At the moment, the international SKA Organisation – the international consortium over-seeing the pre-construction phase of the SKA – is negotiating hosting agreements with both South Africa and Australia, and funding agreements with all partners. SKA Organisation member countries include Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
South Africa is pushing to have its MeerKAT infrastructure and telescope included in its contribution to the giant SKA.