Mystery of creation answered: The £2 billion telescope that will 'see Big Bang'

The first components of the biggest science experiment ever created by man are being built now - aiming to answer the biggest question of all: where the universe came from.

With a $2.7 billion budget dwarfing even the Large Hadron Collider, the Square Kilometer Array is an array of thousands of teelscope dishes seeks to find an even bigger fish than a mere boson - what happened in the Big Bang.

The Square Kilometer Array is so called, because it forms one huge satellite dish built to watch stars billions of light years at a resolution never achieved before. The area of the dish, spread over several continents, is a square kilometer.

The machine could detect signals from radio transmitters 50 light years away - lending weight to a scientist’s recent claim that we will find intelligent life within 20 years.

But the real goal is to witness the moment of creation itself - the Big Bang.

The first dishes - called Meerkats because of the way they peer at the sky - are being built now, but eventually there will be thousands - a device more powerful than any telescope in history, more expensive than any scientific instrrument, and perhaps our best chance to ‘hear’ signals from extraterrestrials.

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Because of the time light takes to travel to Earth, all telescopes look ‘into the past’, as it were - but the SKA’s aims are bigger. It aims to look at the very beginning: the Big Bang.

Managing Director Richard Glazer of Oxford Cryogenics says that the key is simple: focus on a smaller and smaller patch of sky, until you see something so far away that you see it at the moment of the Big Bang itself, more than 13 billion years ago.

“What will it look like?” he says.. “I have no idea. None of us do. A huge bright flash, lasting an instant.” This is what  the SKA - with dishes spread over South Africa, Australia and other countries, will find out.

The SKA - by some margin the most powerful radio telescope of all time - could also find alien life. Previous systems have lacked the detail to pick out a signal made by intelligent creatures from the ‘roar’ of space.

The scale of the device is so vast scientists are facing problems that no one has ever faced before - such as how to digest the vast output of thousands of radio telescopes with a level of power and accuracy never seen before.

“Even Meerkats output so much data it’s equivalent to more than four million DVDs’ worth of data every day,” says Glazer. “Imagine how much data we will receive when thousands of these dishes are in operation. How do we even store it? How do we look into the data for the evidence that we want?”

The ‘full’ Square Kilometer Array will outpace IBM’s initial estimates - and produce 15 times as much data as our current internet, every day. Even if we do see ET, it may be very hard to pick him out.

Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute - one of Earth’s leading alien-hunting organisations, thinks that by the year 2040, telescopes will have scanned enough star systems to find E.T. - not just alien microbes, or planets likely to host life, but radio signals from space.

"I think we'll find E.T. within two dozen years using these sorts of experiments," Shostak said  in a NASA talk at Stanford University.

The key to making the most expensive scientific tool of all time is precision. This is where Oxford Cryogenics come in. The British company is a world leader in making things very cold, very fast - used in industrial vacuum equipment, and high-powered Intel chips.

The chug-chug-chug of the cooling system in an MRI machine is a product of Oxford Cryogenics.

“We try to eliminate anything that interferes with the signal,” says Glazer. “We cool down the arms that transmit data from the dish. It reduces ‘noise’ - meaning we can see more clearly.”

“The effect is slight, but it lets us detect signals more clearly - until eventually we see so far, and so far back in time, that we understand more about the Big Bang.”

“The Meerkat is just one array of telescopes,” says Glazer. “By 2017, there will be 64 of them - used for an early version of the tool called SKA-1.”

“Then as more dishes are built on other continents, there will be 190, then 256. Eventually, there will be thousands of dishes across Africa and Asia”

“The secret of ‘seeing’ the Big Bang isn’t to invent some new machine,” says Glazer. “It’s to take what we have and make it more efficient. Essentially, we look at a small dot in the sky, then a smaller one, and shrink it down. You don’t invent a new technique - you scale what you have, you make it more efficient, just as our cooling systems cut noise in the Meerkats.

“Eventually by sheer scale, we’ll have a machine which can see so far that we’ll see the first moment of our universe. And no one has any idea what that will look like.”