Six radio telescopes across Australia and New Zealand have joined forces to act as one giant telescope, linking up over a distance of 5,500 km for the first time.
The link-up was a collaborative effort between CSIRO, the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research at Curtin University of Technology in Western Australia, and AUT University in New Zealand. Showing Australia and New Zealand can link telescopes in this way strengthens the two countries’ joint bid to host the international SKA telescope.
“The SKA is a truly mega-sized science project with its global reach, scale and ambition, akin to the Large Hadron Collider in Europe,” says CSIRO SKA Director Professor Brian Boyle.
“This successful linking of antennas shows Australia and New Zealand’s commitment to next-generation astronomical research and how seriously we are taking the SKA bid.”
“The linked telescope will make images ten times more detailed than those of the Hubble Space Telescope and has already been used to peer into the heart of a galaxy called Centaurus A,” continues Brian.
The newcomers to the Australasian telescope team are the New Zealand dish, near Warkworth in the hills of the North Island, and the first antenna of CSIRO’s Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope, which is located inland from Geraldton in the Mid West region of Western Australia. The Warkworth dish is operated by AUT and is the first functioning research-quality radio telescope in New Zealand.
Data from the New Zealand radio telescope were transferred from Warkworth directly to Australia using recently established 1 Gb per second connectivity via the Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network (KAREN). “The linking of the Warkworth antenna is a milestone for New Zealand science,” says Professor Sergei Gulyaev, Director of the Institute for Radio Astronomy and Space Research at AUT.
The other telescopes used in the link-up were three CSIRO facilities in New South Wales and a University of Tasmania dish near Hobart.
One of the linked telescope’s first projects has been to study the heart of a galaxy called Centaurus A. Lurking there is a black hole that shoots out jets of radio-emitting particles at close to the speed of light. Observing the galaxy for 10 hours, the telescopes took enough data to fill a stack of DVDs in their cases as high as a nine-storey building. The International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) at Curtin University of Technology provided the equipment for recording the data and also analysed the data to make an image.
Image: Zooming in to the heart of galaxy Centaurus A, 14 million light-years away. This composite image shows the entire galaxy, as imaged by CSIRO radio telescopes; radio emission from a central part of the galaxy, imaged by a US radio telescope; and the innermost part of the galaxy, imaged by the new network of Australian and New Zealand radio telescopes. Image Credits: Whole galaxy: I. Feain, T. Cornwell & R. Ekers (CSIRO/ATNF); ATCA northern middle lobe pointing courtesy R. Morganti (ASTRON); Parkes data courtesy N. Junkes (MPIfR). Inner radio lobes: NRAO / AUI / NSF. Core: S. Tingay (ICRAR) / ICRAR, CSIRO and AUT.