A highly sensitive, next-generation radio observatory has started to come to life, with construction now officially underway on the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) in Australia and South Africa. The dual-site science facility is set to become one of the largest on Earth, and will offers astronomers a new means to explore some of the most fundamental questions about the cosmos when operations begin later this decade.

The SKA Observatory is around three decades in the making and is the brainchild of astronomers from around the world, who came together in the 1980s to explore how radio waves can tell stories about the history of the universe. In 2012, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Organisation settled on two sites in South Africa and Australia to co-host the facility, taking advantage of the lack of human-generated radio waves in remote regions for clear observations of the cosmos.

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Doing so will involve more than 100,000 antennas at the Australian site, in Wajarri Country in Western Australia, and 197 dishes in Karoo in South Africa, where the precursor MeerKAT telescope is already up and running. This will make the SKA Observatory the largest radio astronomy observatory in the world, with ceremonies taking place in both locations on Monday to mark the beginning of construction.

Read more: New Atlas