NZ joins bid to build telescope

By SIMON COLLINS

New Zealand has joined a 16-country project aiming to build a network of radio telescopes that will see back further in time than ever before.

Two possible telescopes, likely to be near Auckland and in Southland, may join about 100 other sites stretching 5000km from New Zealand across Australia and possibly a further 8000km to South Africa.

The US$1 billion ($1.4 billion) project will let scientists probe radiation sources so distant that they must have originated about 13 billion years ago, near the beginning of the universe.

A global committee is due to decide in 2006 between the Australasian proposal, regarded as the frontrunner, and four competing proposals based in China, the US, South Africa and South America.

New Zealand's representative in the consortium, Auckland University of Technology (AUT) Professor Sergei Gulyaev, said Australia and New Zealand would have to contribute 10 per cent of the total cost if their proposal was adopted. New Zealand's share would be "several million" dollars over about 10 years.

"For that small investment, New Zealand will be able to access a US$1 billion facility," he said.

The global consortium director, Australian-educated Dutch professor Richard Schilizzi, and the director of the Australian National Telescope at Parkes, Dr Brian Boyle, will attend an AUT workshop next month and meet government officials.

The head of the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology, Dr Helen Anderson, wrote a letter supporting the New Zealand scientists' bid to join the consortium but has not yet committed government money to it.

Radio telescopes collect radiation in the radio frequency band, at much longer wavelengths than the radiation that we can see as light through optical telescopes.

Many radio telescopes at separate locations can be used as if they were a single telescope. The proposed 5000km span of sites from New Zealand to Western Australia would provide more than 100 times the seeing power of any previous device.

Dr Gulyaev said the network would let astronomers peer into black holes in the middle of many galaxies.

"We hope we will see more about star formation and the cradle of life," he said.

The telescopes will also give scientists an external fix on the Earth, helping to trace changes in the atmosphere and movements in the tectonic plates that break up the planet's surface.

AUT has created a Centre for Radiophysics and Space Research to coordinate New Zealand participation in the project. A former head of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Aeronomics, New Zealand-born Sir Ian Axford, is the centre's patron.

An amateur radio operator, Brent Addis, will let the centre use his 6m radio telescope until larger instruments are built.

CRSR