Mapping the Universe

Scientists from around the world have joined forces to lay the foundations for an experiment of truly astronomical proportions: putting together the biggest map of the Universe ever made. In a series of papers published today on the arXiv.org astrophysics website ( http://arxiv.org/list/astro-ph/new ), an international team of researchers, including a team from The University of Manchester, set out their plans for the mammoth survey. Researchers from the Cosmology Science Working Group of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) have worked out how to use the world's largest telescope for the task. The SKA will be a collection of thousands of radio receivers and dishes spread across two sites in South Africa and Western Australia. When the first phase is completed in 2023, the SKA will have a total collecting area equivalent to 15 football pitches, and will produce more data in one day than several times the daily traffic of the entire internet. A second phase, due around 2030, will be ten times larger still. Such a huge atlas of the distribution of matter in the Universe will also open a new window to investigate the first moments after the Big Bang.