I Went From Stonehenge to the SKA 5,000 Years of Cosmic Curiosity In 45 minutes - Dr Brian Keating (1080p, h264).mp4

This magnificent area, we don't really know what it's about. Where did it come from? Who built it? Why did they build it? Nobody knows. It looks like it could be Easter Island. It could be something else.

Sam.

So we go over here. So this whole area is built in the Paleolithic, the Neolithic area, 5,000 years ago. Imagine being here 5,000 years ago. How did they build it? How do they put it up? How is it possible? Maybe it was NASA. It could have been NASA that did it. So Stonehenge, what is it? Where does it come from? Did the Egyptians build it 5,000 years ago? I mean, how could this possibly have been done? Let's walk around it, let's get a tour of all different angles of it. Beautiful time of day.

Stonehenge, that silent city of stone on the Salisbury Plain in England. We see these magnificent structures and we're instantly struck by a question that has echoed through the millennia. How did this possibly come to be? But before we get to the how, let's just appreciate the what we're talking about. Stones that weigh as much as a fully grown humpback whale. The giant stones known as sarsen stones were quarried from about 20 miles away. They're the heavyweights, but the real head scratcher, the bluestones. These smaller five ton stones came all the way from the Presley Hills in Wales. That's a journey of over 140 miles.

Think about that. These ancient builders didn't have Amazon prime, they had grit ingenuity and we have to assume a lot of very sore backs. It's the ultimate prehistoric DIY project. And they didn't even have YouTube documentaries and tutorials like this one. So how did they do it? The truth is, no one knows for sure. It's one of history's greatest unsolved mysteries, right up there, along with the pyramids and the Easter island heads. But that doesn't stop us from making some very educated guesses with the help of modern science and a bit of logic. Forget alien interventions.

The real answer lies in human genius. The leading theory suggest a large combination of brute force and brilliant engineering. Were they rolling these giant behemoths on longs, hoisting them with massive A frames and rope? Maybe they built enormous earthen ramps. There are some huge dunes and berms nearby that some say are even more impressive than the stone structures themselves. Imagine trying to assemble the world's heaviest flat pack furniture from IKEA. But your instructions are 5,000 years old and written in, well, nothing at all. The builders even carved Woodworking joints, mortise and tenon into the stone. They were shaping the very bones of the earth with the precision of master carpenters.

Bob Vila take a back seat. It's a testament to the idea that with enough brain power, you can move mountains, or at least engineer parts of them. Now it's easy to get fixated on Stonehenge itself. But if you zoom out, you'll find it wasn't built in isolation. It was the spectacular centerpiece of a much larger sacred complex. The ancient motto seems to have been the same as your realtor today. Location, location, location. You have Avebury, a stone circle so vast it contains an entire village.

You have Woodhenge and Durrington Walls, where the builders likely lived, feasted and celebrated and probably put some Doan's medicated back patches on their backs. At least I hope they did. Then there's Silbury Hill, a man made mountain of chalk, the purpose of which is still a mystery to this day. This wasn't just a monument. It was a thriving landscape, a Neolithic metropolitan area buzzing with activity for over a thousand years. It tells us that the people who built Stonehenge weren't just building a structure. They were shaping a whole world. And why would someone want to shape the ancient world? Well, perhaps it was really a timepiece to help them find their place within the cosmos.

This is where Stonehenge truly transcends from an impressive structure to a work of sheer genius. The entire monument is a celestial calendar precisely aligned with the movements of the sun. On the summer solstice, the sun rises directly over the heel stone, flooding the central axis with light. On the winter solstice, it sits perfectly between the tallest chilithon. It's a cosmic clock, a way to mark the passage of time, the changing of the seasons, important events, harvests, and perhaps even to predict eclipses. These ancient astronomers, without telescopes or computers or even zoom meetings and slack messages, understood the rhythms of the universe and encoded them in stone. They weren't just watching the stars. They were in a dialogue with them.

And that conversation is one we're still trying to decipher. You might think that after 5,000 years, Stonehenge would have given up all its secrets. You'd be wrong. The story is still being written. Today, we're applying the full power of 21st century science to this ancient wonder. Ground penetrating radar reveals hidden structures beneath our feet. Geochemical analyses are rewriting the story of where the stones come from. We've only just recently confirmed that the altar stone is from Scotland.

Just this past Year. Who knows what new technologies like muon tomography might bring to this ancient altar of stone? Every new discovery, every new technique brings us one step closer to understanding not just how they built it, but why. Stonehenge reminds us that there are still great mysteries waiting to be solved. While written in the language of stone, time and starlight, the universe is whispering its secrets. And all we have to do is listen and maybe marvel at their ingenuity and the creation they made. Our journey continues, a simple train ride, just a couple hours from one part of England to another. Roughly the same distance from the stone quarrying sites of Scotland and Wales to Stonehenge itself. But the real distance we're about to travel isn't ordinary at all.

And it's not to be measured in miles, but in millennia. No, the train is a time machine, too. With every click of the rails, we're hurtling forward through time. 5,000 years of human history a year. Every click, we're leaping past the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the rise and fall of empires, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, the Information Age, the Space Age, all of it. We're trading in the Stone Age for the Space Age. We have arrived at Jodrell Bank. Here, we no longer track the sun across the sky with stones.

We listen for the whispers of cosmic creation itself. We've gone from charting our nearest star to capturing the echoes of the Big Bang. From seeing the light to hearing in the darkness. The tools have changed, but the quest has not. Astronomers, both modern and ancient, have the same exact curiosity. The same curiosity that inspired our ancestors to raise those stones back at Stonehenge now drives us to build these colossal dishes and ultra cold telescope components. The desire to look up, to ask what's out there and what's our place in it all? That's the timeless engine of human discovery.

All right, here we are. The famous professor Lucio Piccirillo, former director, was it?

Director, Yeah.

I have been director for a brief period.

Now we're here at the level, it's.

Lovell or Lowell Lovell.

Lovell Telescope, after going to Stonehenge, you see, come to a very different type of observatory, much more modern, still pretty, pretty in sync with mankind's oldest desires. Here we have some more scientists here.

Well, for example, the CIA took it over.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Wasn't it used in the Apollo missions because.

No, it was used to track the Sputnik.

Ah, that's right.

I was tracking.

So that was the only, the only. This one antenna. Yeah, the only antenna that could get the signal from the Sputnik.

So they work with the CIA?

Well, that's what I've been told.

That's the official.

This was built 70 years ago. About 70 years ago.

Wow.

How diameter is 76 meter diameter. It's so a football pitch.

It's very, very impressive.

I mean the structure is still sound.

Can it rotate? Do they still use it for anything or is it just a display?

No, no, this is working. It works. Most of the research is in pulsar.

Oh yeah.

And they're trying to detect gravitational waves.

Ah. From the pulsar timing. Yeah, I know we have one of these. Lucha is going to build this one.

You can see a big bearing there.

Yeah.

The elevation bearing is part of a ship. The cannon, you know.

Oh, a turret.

Yeah, a turret of the all the cannon.

Wow.

How long did it take to build? Here, let me, let me.

Oh, it was the probably is. Is written here. It was not. Not long.

I mean who's the founder?

So what he did after the war. He was one of the other people that actually worked on the radar. So he had a lot of equipment. He said what do I do with this equipment? And so he said okay, let's build a radio telescope.

So they first tracked Sputnik to see if it was. They thought it was a weapon basically.

Right.

It was just a radio transit.

I met the man I. I had. Yeah. Oh, he was a remarkable man. Remarkable somebody, huh?

Yeah.

Yeah. The. The elevation. The elevation turret. I mean the bearing of the elevation Battleship.

Yeah.

Yeah. So it could point360,180. It could flip over. Does it go all the way over or just up to 90 degrees?

No, no, it does the full. Well, you can see the thing goes full.

Is that a communications app?

So no, this one is actually tracking Casse.

And then it was used. Was it used during.

See these shuttles were used to Mongol Pulse, especially Crab Pulse. The lies in the Crab Nebula.

So we use that Tau A for polarization for the Simons Observatory. I know that's one of our calibration sources.

So Simon is the Mark 2 telescope. Okay. Was the first one. It's completely automatic. And this sucked up the Imerlin, you know.

Now tell me about SKAL. What is SKL?

7 km array. SKA stands for square Kilometer Array is essentially a telescope whose aim is to get the 1 square kilometer convecting area. Obviously with many, many dishes. Oh, he's moving. Oh no. It might be.

That's my job.

No, I think they're preparing to move. Not I have been up to there not inside.

The inside, yeah.

Inside is only. Only for the technical. They want to do service. Although I. I wanted to, bro. Yeah, I'm sure I wanted Vinnie. So you can see actually the access to the inside. You see some steps there, you see? Yeah, that's that.

And then it goes into a door. Then you can access the GD all the way up.

There's a catwalk, it looks like, from that side.

That's an interesting walk to do.

Yeah, I'm sure in the winter, at.

Night with wind and.

Yeah, it's a nice day.

So anyway, it's remarkable. It's a remarkable dish.

They have machine shops here.

Yeah, there is a machine show now, you know, all the scientists are in Manchester here. Just the technical stuff, running the telescope.

Was it always affiliated with Manchester? Yes, Zaur Lowell was research.

Well, it's his base. I don't know actually why it was given to the University of Manchester, but I think part of the funding certainly now, you know, Manchester is paying for.

Now there's another telescope here that's a 7 meter diameter telescope a little bit bigger than the Simons Observatory telescope. Then there's a big telescope over there and they're looking. That telescope just looks at a calibration source called the Crab Nebula or Taurus A. It's a polarized supernova remnant discovered in the year 1054 in a Milky white.

In the center of it all is the Crab's pulsar, a rapidly rotating neutron star. The pulsar has an incredibly strong magnetic field and rotates very fast. It produces a wind of energetic particles that we call a pulsar wind nebula. These thin bright lines trace the shape of the magnetic field around the pulsar.

That was actually used for calibration for the Simons Array and the Simons Observatory. Yeah, the pulsar has a pulsar at the center of it and it could detect it really easily. Now, when the first pulsars were discovered by my past guest, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, she thought that she had been seeing alien communication because the pulses are so regular they come off.

So no, it was a tongue in cheek nickname that I gave these things. We needed some sort of short name you can't or talk about, you know that funny source we keep seeing at 1919 plus 23. Yeah, indeed.

So I was ruminating last night as I was looking over your books and your work and there's a wonderful short documentary about you in the New York Times from earlier this year. I will link to that in the video and text description. But I was thinking you really did do something quite remarkable, perhaps for the first time in human history, which is that you use your brain to discover something, not just your eyes through a telescope, because you made these first discovery of these objects, which we call pulsars, to this very day. And I was thinking about all the serendipitous things that had to come about for that to happen. The right wavelength, the right time, the right instrument. And I wonder if you can tell me, are you as fascinated by pulsars now as you were when you discovered them 54 years ago?

Just to backtrack slightly, I think we don't want to imply that nobody else has a brain.

That's true.

That they thought it was actually an alien communication network that was coming in from space and that they couldn't detect they were actually being. So they called the sources little green men. LGM Today, they still look for aliens, but they haven't seen any yet. So the whole telescope tilts on its axis like this in the elevation, and then rotates on this huge rail track in azimuth. It's kind of about twice or three times the distance of Stonehenge. They're both used for astronomical purposes. We know more about this one, but it seems to be in even worse condition than the Stonehenge. This huge rail system goes back and forth, and then it rotates on this other track system here.

So this track system works perfectly. We're gonna go get a tour of the inside. All the computing takes place inside. They use massive computers to connect the telescope. And so what's going on with the Simons Observatory? What's being built here? Explain what's being built there.

Oh, we have two SOTs. They build radio frequencies.

That's 150 gigahertz and 90 gigahertz. That's where the sign B and RS50.

So we went for the peak, around the peak of the cmb.

And they're using kid detectors instead of TDS here.

You're using kids detectors.

Detectors different than this, right? Very different than that. What kind of detectors were inside of this? Were they radio? What frequencies did it operate at? Usually from 1 to 5 gigahertz, 1 to 5 gigahertz,. But that's where the water line is. 14. That's when the pulsars detected all stars were. But now the actual array that she. The pulsar detection, she used a bunch of linear antennas. Right.

Or in a field somewhere.

Right.

Other districts like this, smaller, but not this way.

This way.

And so actually, the, erling will be described by Simon Garrington. So we can. It will give you the power.

Give us a nice.

Yeah, the proper. The proper data. Perfect.

Now, we've come and explored a lot at Jodrell bank, but it still has many more secrets, including some of the most incredible scientific components and contributions to the Simons Observatory that will enable us to achieve a wide range of science goals. We're going to see soon where this research takes place, but before we do, we want to take a deeper look into some of the most fascinating research conducted by anywhere on Earth. And it's all taking place at Jodrell. The United Kingdom received funding at an astonishing amount of over 20 million Great British pounds. And that's going to be put to great use to enhance and upgrade the Simons Observatory. What is known as the updated Simons Observatory will have three sats funded by the Simons Foundation. It was originally called so Nominal. Then it will have two additional sats, small aperture telescopes looking for the primordial B mode polarization due to gravitational weights from inflation if inflation took place.

Two of them are funded by the United Kingdom, built with different technology, including KIDS Kinetic Inductance Device detectors. Lastly, our colleagues in Japan are building a third sat, which will operate at low frequencies to help guard against foreground contamination. This is funded entirely within Japan, so we've got funding from three different continents to enable incredible scientific return. So this SAT started observing in late 2023 and will continue going through at least 2028, which time we'll switch over to the full contingent of six sats, plus the 30,000 or more detectors in the Simons Observatory Large Aperture Telescope, which, large as it is, is much smaller than the level telescope shown here.

We're the ska, which is the largest radio telescope of Maine. They have different printouts, as I'm not saying versus.

We need to go be. Wow.

So this is the control room. Well, that is authentic. That's authentic. That's right. This is Peter, Timmy, past guest on the podcast. He's backlit, horribly going this direction. We're ready for your call.

Right.

So, Peter, you remember your appearance on the podcast? Fan favorite, Father's Day episode? I think it was 2021.

It's been a while since you've been in Wisconsin and spent your own days at the observatory and through the cold winter and so forth.

But we're.

Yeah, we've passed into a new phase before the bugs have come.

At first glance, this could be a plantation of Christmas trees in the Australian outback. But you're looking at what some are calling one of humanity's biggest ever scientific endeavors. This is an artist's impression of what's known as the SKA Low Telescope, currently being built in Western Australia. It's one of two critical components that when completed, will together form the SKA Observatory, or skao. The second part is the SKA Mid Telescope, now under construction in South Africa. SKAO will consist of more than 130,000 antennas and almost 200 dishes across the two continents that will make it the largest radio observatory in the world, promising to answer some of our biggest questions about the universe. ANU's Professor Naomi McClure Griffiths is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science who discovered a spiral arm of the Milky Way and is chair of skao's Science and Engineering Advisory Committee. She says SKAO will enable science to take a giant leap forward.

It's the chance to be able to see the very first stars in the universe with windows turned on and then everything from the very beginning to us here and looking at how planets form in our own galaxy.

For that to happen, radio telescopes must be located a long way from other human made transmissions such as tv, radio and mobile phone signals, which can interfere with the relatively weak radio waves coming from space. That makes this site on Wanji country ideal. It's already home to precursor telescopes like like this one. The site itself is called in Yarimana il Garibundara, the CSIRO Murchison Radio Astronomy Observatory, which translates to sharing sky and stars. The traditional owners agree to host the science facilities on their land as part of a broader agreement that will ensure educational, social and economic benefits for community. And the benefits to society as a whole can't be overstated. Science Minister Ed Husick says skao's cutting edge technology will expose Australian businesses to new skills and capabilities. We will see those changes flow on for generations to come.

SKAO will also enhance Australia's growing space industry, with scientists from around the world making regular use of the observatory. Some will even be on the lookout for intelligent extraterrestrial life if an alien species were out there trying to reach out and say hello. By the time that radio signal got to Earth, it would have been so weak we wouldn't be able to detect it, says SKA low telescope director Dr. Sarah Pierce. But that changes with SKAO. The observatory will start producing science before the end of the decade.

So yeah, let's take a look now.

We're about to hear something fascinating. This SKA is one of the most impressive and ambitious projects that humanity has ever devised, let alone in Astronomy.

Okay, yeah, we're all here, Andrew. Welcome to the observatory.

This is the heart of the observatory. This is the control room for both the big lava telescope 250 foot and the whole network of telescopes that we operate and trust the country. We draw remotely, but remotely operated, but might need to be on and click. You've had a look at the telescope mount side already. I guess you've been up there. Okay, so right now we're doing some painting on the telescope. We need to do some painting every year to try and keep it in good condition. It's been here since 1957, so remarkably fast project.

So the telescope was conceived in 1950. So we have the memo of the meeting of the Royal National Society where they said, okay, let's go ahead with this project in some form in February. By October, November, they had the whole steelwork design.

And that was lucky because that was when Sputnik was launched, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, this is 1950 or 1950, I'll say. So so they had the whole design. So from sort of, let's go to whole design was six months as they started digging in spring 1952. And by 1957 it was complete. So remarkably fast. What was amazing was also they changed the design of the telescope while they were building it. The original design didn't look like this. It was designed for much longer wavelengths, so 8 meter wavelength with very coarse.

So 4 inch mesh for the surface. There's just a single girder between two towers like a bridge that is built by a bridge designer. So it's just a single sort of beam between two towers and then radial ribs to support a mesh surface. But, but after they built the foundations and started to build the towers, they completely changed the design. Realized they wanted to go to higher frequencies, they wanted to do 21 centimeters. So we're going to let 21 centimeters straight through Nassau. And also the dean, the Minister of Defense said could you make it work for Nisar train? And they made that suggestion, said okay, that we need to make it much better performance. Our groups is much better surfaces.

And then stepped back, said okay, you have some of our inclines now. So the telescope became completely changed the design and this. So this is, you know, just guys with drawing tables and slideshows redesigning that in a matter of months. Completely changed the design, but stuck to the schedule eventually and just. And then it ended up cost twice as heck, four times the cost compared to issues. So it was on schedule as a factor of four or five under budget, which was a financial Crisis at the time as you say, what sei did was split me.

Yeah.

So just you know in the month that they finished it, the first satellite was launched and this is one of the first thing that's the track the smoke satellite. It's not the satellite the rock. So they got. They put out 36 megahertz and then 120 megahertz raise our arms and they got an echo on this rock body which was fairly norbit separately from Westbrooks.

That's right.

So certainly it was built entirely for radio astronomy but had the second role in sunsp space tracking activities in the solar.

Was it used at all during the Apollo like communicate as a communication link or anything else.

So so actually this. So during the Apollo landing the small telescope there a small telescope on the roof tracked the Orlando and we have the Doppler signal as you see Armstrong taking the manual control in as a Doppler as it becomes wiggly idol. But at the same time said there's a Soviet mission landing on the moon at the same time. Right. So Luna 15 was a Soviet sample return mission that landed on crash crashed in the surface.

Yeah.

While they were. While Armstrong and co were on the surface at moon. So we have. So we've got the recordings of them tracking that. So this was tracking the Soviet crashing into the surface. And so we have them, you know and they realized straight away that we crashed it hadn't been successful for which they could do a cell for zeit. So yeah, so did that. And so that was 69, you know, earlier in the 60s we intercepted signals from all the Soviet nun missions and space missions which it was in their interest for us to do that.

So it was in the Soviet interest to have a sort of independent capital Meozo T verification. Right. What they're doing.

So nowadays there's a whole cohort of people online that don't believe the moonlit Apollo moon landing happened. But it's actually the Soviets that confirmed that the Americans did have.

Yeah, there's that escapism in the U.S.

Yeah in the U.S. okay here this is crop circles. Right. That's the only thing.

So that was. So that was you know a small part of his time. It was built entirely of science and continues to be used in science and sort of front rank instrumentally. Most already does the moment his pulses are tiny. So it's you know one of the. Part of these pulsar tiling arrays. Yeah. Where we're getting whole networks of pot cells for a long key.

Correct. So Right. That's A nanosecond residuals over you know that work is nearing a detection. It's not a detection yet but the combination resolved when this was built Weirder there is a knife cast smaller tall.

Scoops near here that they've already established the site.

So yeah so the site is established right after the war. So in the day was was May 1945. By July Lovell was here doing experiments. He was trying to get radar echoes from cosmic ray from the Ramospheres fuse charge power tools thanks to our atmosphere try and get a radar echo from that he wanted he brought some equipment here who was no electricity. No no houses have electricity right to the garage this garage where we used to get our cars serviced Just over the road they have a generator. So he hooked up his equipment to that generator abgo and then late and then that led to by December they came and set things up on this side probably so they put their first tenors on a search line there and then they built this had 220 but now it's this now it doesn't really set and background loop test is a little radio emission from drones first initially radiation radio emission from another galaxy. We we go to about seven. Seven.

Yeah. So I've done certainly I've done even done a radar stuff at 7 GHz as well here and then then then the the network of other telescopes are built. The level had ambitions for much bigger probably much higher. It would be 500ft so 5km across that would be so you will see.

Along this road and on the right you will see the.

So we'll do just scrap Sabata perfect He had plans for that. That was so. So this was the mark one.

Okay.

The mark two is that elliptical over there. The mark three was this all these were written down in 1961. Mark three was like a Meccano version of the Mark.

Thank you very much for Very well.

Initially thought about finding a having that on a rail track to do variable baseline interrometry and then thought about sighting Wales that that was massive. Spent a lot of money on the feasibility of that had the full design got a model of the design here it was that the designer for that same designer as this telescope didn't believe in the principle of topology to make a you know a parabola that deforms because say it's parabola and idea for F is very transferring not all other telescopes now. So who's trying to build it as a rigid structure and it was just getting heavier and heavier and then having to be More rigid and just getting bigger and bigger. Right. Became very expensive. So it went. And they had, when they put in the final proposal for that they had sort of, you know this, if you don't fund this then open envelope B. And envelope B was the plans for a network of telescope which became our network, you know, sort of long based.

So the same guys who were building and using this in the 1990, the late 1950s developed long baseline infometries. So they were, they were taking transportable antennas, a teammate to the, to the next field, to the next village across the country connected back here with a radio. They're not, not constrained by a cable connected in front and a radio interpreter. So you know they did 1 km, 4 km, 10 km, 100 km. So even by late 1950s early 60s they had Hun so pre VLBI so real time connected via radiome. But 100 kilometer basically and that. And with that they discovered compact sources which weren't known as you know and that those positions were passed to the Caltech group using Panama to search for whatever they were. Yeah, marine deshaet and that became quasats these.

It was that those long baseline experiments sending their latest results on the compact options to counts that could lead to this cohes.

We have a time constraint for the ska. So sorry to interrupt.

Right.

So I gotta show the history but I say yeah, no that's great.

We're you know, I mean emerging is the leading instrument for high resolution astronomy.

Can we get an explanation of it or are they going to use it now? Can we get. Can we take a look over there.

With us then or do you have.

Quick explanation that emerg not overwriting at the moment because we're doing some encodes as we are on yellow transfer. So this is, this is 200 km of separation of antennas can hold that across across the UK. So that gives us 50 milliacsecond resolution. So similar resolution to sorry, how many kaskotramic. So there's five other telescopes across the UK plus two telescopes here. So seven telescopes all together. So yeah, that gives us a resolution of 50100 milliarc seconds. Same sort of resolution as the HST or, or Webb, but a radio wavelength.

And that's, that's a UK facility international facility used by hundreds of scientists in the UK and around the world for everything from formation of planets, formation and evolution of stars, form evolution of galaxies, even weak lensing for dark matter.

Dark.

What's the longest baseline between the 220km. Okay, yeah and that's up north or south.

That's, that's from. Actually from, from Cambridge is the most distant one.

Yeah.

To one in Shropshire which is a bit, bit south and to the, to the west.

And two of those are offline or the.

Well, we're doing maintenance at various telescopes at the moment because it's summer. We do, we do some. So at the moment we're doing some painting of. So, so these ones. So knock in and see Pickmere, they're similar to the VLA dishes. So the 25 meter, 80 foot, 85 foot dishes, Cambridge is a 32 meter south.

And this is tracking sources. This is the planetarium software here first.

Yeah. Just so we can see where we're pointing. So we're not pointing at the moment because we just, we're just doing some maintenance. But yeah, so no staff, any of those sites, all remotely operated from here. And then we have our own optical fiber network, Dio fiber network, connecting those to a correlator here. So as much bandwidth as we want from those telescopes and then correlated in real time using a hardware correlator built in.

It's analog and not digital or it's digital.

No, no, it's digitized at the scope.

And then set by fiber.

But at the moment, well, we're just upgrading it to 100 gigabit network. But at the moment that's a sort of proprietary format correlation here.

Down to the famously sunny skies.

Well, South Manchester, we, we have had a very nice summer relatively recently. So.

Yeah, yes, a little bit clearer during our visit. Yeah, so far.

Anyway. Hi, my name's Keith Grange, so I'll take you over to the SK headquarters there. But just on the way I'll point out this radio telescope here and just actually really for comparison because this is a 12.8 meter diameter telescope. So just bear that in mind when I tell you about what the SK is going to be. So the, the SKA is a, a, a new radio telescope that's being built at the moment and it, it has a slogan of three sites, two telescopes, one observatory. So this is one of the sites, the, the headquarters here. And then we've got two telescopes actually being constructed at the moment in one in South Africa, one in Australia and they're actually rather different telescopes. I'll show you shortly.

Hopefully the two different types of technologies.

There we go. Right.

So welcome to SK headquarters. So the, the, the SKA is going to be an interferometer, basically much the same, as much the same as Simon's just been telling you about, E Merlin and it's going to be made up of telescopes like this one here, except that those are going to be 15 meter diameter. So by comparison, just a little bit bigger than the one you just saw out there. The thing is though, there's going to be 197 of these scattered around in the Kourou Desert in, in South Africa. And so the maximum baseline, so the maximum distance between any of those antennas is going to be 150 kilometers. And as Simon told you, that's what actually gives you the, the angular resolution, the resolving power to be able to actually pick out really fine detail in astrophysical sources. Also, if you have a look at this thing, you can see it's made up of panels of which this is an example here. So if you get yourself, I don't know, 80 or so of these panels and stick them together, then you will actually allow yourself to build one of those SK dishes.

So these triangular panels are basically shown in miniature there. Almost as big as Peter.

Yeah. So I think that this was taken off to. We recently had a summer science exhibition down in London where people were invited to go and sign the thing, which is why it's quite so colorful. And I think this is also part of their display where you can actually find out wonderful facts about what the epoch of reionization is and things like that. So this is, that's the telescope that's going to go down to South Africa. In Australia we're going to have a rather different type of telescope which is made up of this rather less prepossessing type of antenna like this. This is a log periodic antenna. Okay.

But the amazing thing about this is that in Australia we're going to have 131,000 of these. So that's just a mind boggling thing. The simulations of what this will look like are quite incredible. And now they've actually got the best part of 8,000 of these things already deployed in the outback. Yes, it's in a really deserted part of Australia just to the north of Perth. And in fact the, the area that they've got is, has a longest baseline about 70km or so. And it's so deserted that the, the population in that area is about 21. Okay.

So it's the size of the Netherlands with a population of 21. So we're really trying to get away from human habitation to try and get as little radio frequency interference as possible. And the difference between these two telescopes is this one's going to be looking at low frequency, so long wavelengths. So it's going to go from 50 MHz all the way up to 350 MHz for reionization. Exactly, yes. Whereas those rather more traditional kind of dish telescopes of which we have 197, those are going to go from 350 megahertz up to 15.5 gigahertz. And so actually we span quite a huge range of frequencies which mean that there's a gigantic amount of science that you can do. Which just to illustrate that, here's the SKA science case.

Anybody want to feel. Anyone want to feel the weight? So this is 135 chapters worth of sign that was come up with back in. Yeah, it's quite, quite. If you're ever looking for a Christmas present for someone.

There you go.

And it really does. The thing about the SK is it really does have a really broad science remit. And so there's plenty of these kind of panels here showing the different science working groups of the SKA and the type of work they're going to have going on the other thing. And because I'm mindful of the fact that I've only got three minutes left, just if you come this way, I always feel as though, although it's not actually anything to do with science, but it's quite, quite nice to see. As long as they're not using it. We should have a quick peek into the council chamber. The council chamber. Okay.

Come on in. So, wow. This is the users for the observatory. This is what you need. I mean, it always feels to me as though this is either the UN or you should have a Stablo Blofeld sitting here with a white cat kind or stroking it.

$1 million will unleash the labor.

Exactly. And the other thing to say is this is quite an international experiment. Here's the flags of all the. Yes, you can now go and stand beside your favorite flag. So this is actually used regularly for local internal meetings. It's used for council meetings. We also actually get to, as part of the University of Manchester, to be able to borrow this every now and again. So for.

Yeah, so for example, the symposium that happens often happens here. So that's a meeting. Well, for a group meeting, it might be a little bit over. Over intimidating, but it's a. It's a nice, nice kind of thing to have available. And it, it is a. I really love working here because if you're in the middle of a really tedious zoom meeting, you can just look out the window and you get a bit of inspiration for seeing the, the Lovel telescope out there. So it's a It's a very nice site to work at.

From stone circles to great steel dishes, the tools have evolved, but the fundamental quest remains the same. We want to get to know our universe and how we fit into it. Today, we've taken a journey from the Stone Age to the Space Age to the Ska Age. We've mapped the hidden architecture of the solar system, gone beyond it to the local cosmos, looking at pulsars, the beating heartbeats from dead stars. But the quest will not end until we get back to the very first stars to ever form. That will come online soon with the Square Kilometer Array. Soon we will be listening to the first sounds of the early cosmos. Earliest structures to form.

The early cosmos remains a mystery, shrouded in what's called the Dark Ages. But they won't remain dark for much longer. Stay tuned next time for another fascinating journey into the impossible. With me, Brian Keating, the Chancellor's Distinguished professor of Physics at UC San Diego. As we explore the cosmos, bringing with it our insatiable curiosity, click here for a video that I know you're going to love. Don't forget to like, comment and subscribe.