City scientists play crucial role in viewing dawn of Universe

In search of a view of the birth of the first stars and galaxies almost 13 billion years ago, the Raman Research Institute, Bangalore (RRI) along with its partners in Australia, New Zealand and the US has achieved a milestone building the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), a radio telescope in the Australian outback in Murchison state.

Scientists from RRI have been working on the project since its conception about seven years ago, but this is only a part of the final project which includes setting up the International Square Kilometre Array (SKA) - a massive global project to build the world's largest radio telescope across Australia and South Africa.

Ravi Subrahmanyan, Director of the RRI said: "The creation of the MWA is a technological marvel that will help humanity take the first exploratory steps into times in our cosmic history that have remained inaccessible to date. It will enable astronomers to glean insights into our own Milky Way and galaxies beyond, pulsing and exploding stellar objects, and the influence of the sun on interplanetary space weather close to the Earth."

The digital receivers of the MWA were built at the RRI. RRI engineers and scientists worked along with international partners in the remote Australian outback installing and commissioning the telescope.

The telescope is being set up there because of the remoteness of the area and the very sparse population which ensures minimal radio frequency pollution and interference.

Australia's 12th Nobel Prize winner, Brian Schmidt AC, was recognized at the |celebrations for his role as a Board member of the MWA international partnership since its inception. Professor Schmidt was a joint winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2011, for proving the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate.

This next-generation new-technology radio telescope promises to herald pathbreaking advances in the deployment of distributed and massively parallel antenna technology, integrated receivers, energy systems, communications and computing, an RRI spokesperson said.