MWA all set to view dawn of the universe!

BANGALORE, INDIA: In search of a view of the birth of the first stars and galaxiesalmost 13 billion years ago- the ‘cosmic dawn' -the Raman Research Institute, Bangalore (RRI) with partners in Australia, the US and New Zealand has achieved a milestone building the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), a radio telescope in the Australian outback.

Prof. Ravi Subrahmanyan, director of the RRI said: "We are delighted to participate in this courageous global enterprise. The creation of the MWA is a technological marvel that will help humanity take the first exploratory steps into times in our cosmic history that have remained inaccessible to date. It will enable astronomers to glean insights into our own Milky Way and galaxies beyond, pulsing and exploding stellar objects, and the influence of the Sun on inter-planetary space weather close to the Earth."

The digital receivers of the MWAwere built at RRI. RRI engineers and scientists worked along with international partners in the remote Australian outback installing and commissioning the telescope.

"Australia has a rich tradition of achievement in science and technology. The MWA is a fantastic example of how Australia and India are working together at the cutting edge of science," said Australia's High Commissioner to India, Patrick Suckling, who attended RRI to participate in the celebrations.

Australia's 12th Nobel Prize winner, Prof. Brian Schmidt AC, was recognized at the celebrations for his role as a Board member of the MWA international partnership since its inception. He was a joint winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2011 for proving that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, and will give a Seminar on "Supernovae" on 19 August at RRI, a Lecture under the auspices of the Indian Academy of Sciences on 20 August at the Indian Institute of Science, and a Public Talk entitled "Accelerating Universe" on 21 August at Bangalore University.

The completion of the MWA is a momentous step to the setting up of the international Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a massive global project to build the world's largest radio telescope across Australia and South Africa. This next-generation new-technology radio telescope promises to herald path-breaking advances in the deployment of distributed and massively parallel antenna technology, integrated receivers, energy systems, communications and computing.