Southern stars

By Matt Cooney, March 1, 2006 @ 9:27 am

New Zealand may host the next big thing in research

Illustration by Daron Parton

Karaka, South Auckland, is better known for racehorses and polo than as the site of one of New Zealand’s more important scientific experiments. Yet on a series of winter evenings in July last year AUT University Professor Sergei Gulyaev and his colleagues successfully showed Kiwi scientists are ready to be included in what Gulyaev calls “the biggest scientific adventure of the century”. At stake is a role in the Square Kilometre Array, a billion-dollar effort to build a vast network of radio telescopes to peer further into the Universe than ever before.

New Zealand doesn’t have much of an international reputation in radio astronomy but the successful test at Karaka could change all that. Gulyaev and colleagues Brent Addis and Tim Natusch spent their evenings at Karaka pointing their relatively tiny portable telescope towards a plasma disc and black hole 4.5 billion light years away. On the other side of the Tasman, Australian astronomers were pointing their own massive telescopes—including the 45-year-old Parkes telescope made famous in the film The Dish—at the same object. If the Kiwis and Aussies could synchronise their telescopes then they’d prove that the Square Kilometre Array could be made to work across the Tasman, greatly increasing the size of the instrument.

The process is complex—the telescopes are thousands of kilometres apart, yet “you need to know the distance between antennas with centimetre accuracy,” says Gulyaev. It’s also surprisingly crude: an Aussie supercomputer took two months to confirm the Kiwi telescope was in sync with its larger Australian neighbours, while Gulyaev and his colleagues kept working, unaware that they’d already succeeded. But succeed they had. “This was really important to prove that New Zealand can do it,” says Gulyaev. “Now the Australians talk to us in a completely different way. Now we are colleagues!” Already, Gulyaev has been offered a seat on the nine-strong board that is driving the Australian bid for the Square Kilometre Array. “It’s the frontier of science and technology,” says a delighted Gulyaev. “It’s so great that we are involved in it.”

More than 1,000 scientists are working together to build the Square Kilometre Array. Although much of the scientific know-how will come from the US and Europe, the telescopes will be placed somewhere with less radio interference. China, Argentina, South Africa and Australia are possible sites, with Aussie and South Africa the most likely to be picked. The Australian plan calls for about 100 stations, each with 10–20 telescopes, placed in a spiral pattern 5,500 kilometres wide, stretching from Western Australia to New Zealand.

With a combined dish area of one million square metres, the array will be about 100 times more sensitive than the tools astronomers currently use and Gulyaev expects it to usher in a new golden age of astronomy. “It’s like Galileo in 1604 for the first time looked at the sky through a little telescope and his vision increased 100 times.” Galileo was the first to notice the moons of Jupiter, spots on the Sun and craters on the moon. “It was a revolution,” says Gulyaev. “That’s what we expect from this: revolution.”

The telescope will be used to answer some big questions, among them the search for signs of alien civilisation, the birth of planets, the evolution of galaxies and understanding the ‘dark ages’ of the Universe when the very first stars were formed. Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, which has survived longer than scientists expect, will also come in for a searching examination, and perhaps scientists will learn how magnetic fields originated. “That is probably the biggest puzzle right now in the whole of science,” says Gulyaev.

It’s what scientists don’t expect to find, however, that may be the most interesting of all: serendipitous discoveries—the astronomical equivalent of the discovery of penicillin. “This is something we can expect when we see with great resolution,” says Gulyaev.

The southern hemisphere skyline first drew Gulyaev to New Zealand as a visiting professor. When he was offered a position as an adjunct professor at AUT University, his family was “happy to stay in this beautiful country” and Gulyaev himself was attracted both by the talent he found in Godzone and by the stability the country offers. Now director of AUT’s Centre for Radiophysics and Space Research, he’s an enthusiastic advocate for local astronomy and geo-science. “I’m just part of a team. We’re working with fantastic people. This is where I understood what Kiwi creativity is.”