Murchison Widefield Array reaches historic milestone BY ICRAR/CURTIN UNIVERSITY
The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), the longest-running SKA precursor instrument, has marked a historic decade of operations ahead of its crucial final phase. To mark the occasion, members of the global astronomy community gathered in Perth to hear about the latest in MWA science. MWA Director Prof. Steven Tingay said it was a significant milestone for the project – a powerful telescope made up of 8,192 antennas spread across more than 30 km² on Wajarri Yamaji land in Western Australia. “It’s a point in time to look back and reflect on the origin of the project and all the trials and tribulations we went through to design and build and then start operating the telescope,” he said. “It’s also a chance to look back on all the amazing science we’ve done over that time. “In the next 12 months, a major upgrade to the MWA’s facilities in Western Australia will enable it to generate four times more data than it ever has, while doubling its sensitivity to probe even deeper into the secrets of our Universe.” Led by Curtin University, with more than 20 research partners in six countries, the MWA is one of the fundamental stepping stones to the SKA telescopes and has been at the forefront of international astronomy since it started operations in 2013.
Over the past decade, the MWA has catalogued and surveyed hundreds of thousands of galaxies, with more than 47 PB of data collected and stored in the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre in Perth. It detected the largest-known eruption in the Universe since the Big Bang, discovered new types of exotic celestial objects that generate periodic bursts of radio waves, and even revealed previously unknown structures in the Earth’s uppermost atmosphere. It was used to discover a mysterious object in our galaxy – possibly a dead star with an intense magnetic field that produces powerful bursts of radio waves every 22 minutes (see page 25). The MWA has also determined new limits on the Epoch of Reionisation, the period when the first stars and galaxies formed, and has produced an all-sky survey that resulted in the first radio-colour panorama of the galaxy. Switzerland has recently joined the international MWA Consortium, bringing a group of Swiss universities into the project’s family. As MWA’s sixth participating country, Switzerland joins Australia, Canada, China, Japan, and the USA, and brings exciting scientific and technical capabilities to the MWA team, in addition to its involvement in the SKAO.
A tile of MWA antenna next to the iconic breakaway. Image credit: ICRAR NOVEMBER
2023
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