Square Kilometre Array

That's, And

also awesome about this is this, what was used for this was Meerkat, which is a radio telescope that is part of a larger thing called the Square Kilometer Array.

So it's a demonstration of our tech at the same time, not just because that's just like the progenitor for the next big, huge radio telescope we're going to have.

So the more radio experimentation we do on exoplanets, the better it's driving the way.

But there are some big projects.

There's one called the Square Kilometer Array that's a whole bunch of radio dishes, mostly in South Africa, and a couple of neighboring places, you make a huge array of dishes in a bunch of different places to try to bring together the information to look for this transition.

There are a couple of projects that are just like a single sort of antenna, basically, and they're just kind of adding up all of the radiation from the whole sky and trying to disentangle this signal through sort of creative processing.

And there's one called Edges, which is one of the single dish experiments that Telescope has claimed to see that dip, that absorption of light, but in a way that seems sort of like too big a signal.

It's a decade of patient radio follow-up on rare events assembled into one picture.

And it lands in the same week that we're talking about the Square Kilometer Array's southern half taking shape out in Western Australia.

Which is precisely the instrument you'd want pointed at the next one.

Two things to keep straight, though.

learnt more and more and things came up.

Also, the Square Kilometre Array Project came up, up the road, it was 160km up the road and there was little projects up there that we could do, whether it was drilling holes for solar panels.

That was a big job for us.

I don't know how many of us could be able to tell you the numbers, but they needed a whole big solar array for their power system.

Uh, and seeing...

I, I saw the first, uh, uh, antenna of the Square Kilometre Array, so that was truly, truly special.

And, uh, I wanted to do that, uh, and the plan that I had in, in place, uh, fell through.

Mm-hmm.

MeerKAT is incredibly powerful, but it is officially a precursor telescope.

It is the technological proving ground for an upcoming mega project that will completely redefine astronomy, the Square Kilometer Array Observatory, or SKAO.

Yes, the SKAO.

It represents an exponential leap in observational capability.

When fully constructed, it will be the largest radio telescope in human history.

Larger than MeerKAT's sixty-four dishes.

Much larger.

Instead of sixty-four dishes, the SKAO will utilize hundreds of dishes in South Africa and over a hundred thousand low-frequency dipole antennas spread across Western Australia.

MeerKAT works the same field.

Both sites are the foundations of the Square Kilometer Array.

Which we talked about five days ago for a completely different reason.

The MeerKAT 21-centimeter detection, a different way of weighing the same universe with the same kind of dish.