2015 AAAS Annual Meeting (12-16 February 2015)

February 12 - 16, 2015

Scanning the Southern Skies: Harnessing Big Astronomy Data with the Square Kilometer Array

Astronomy is big business and just got bigger. This session tells the story of the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), the world’s largest, most powerful radio telescope extending over 2,000 miles. Co-located in eight sub-Saharan states with a core in South Africa and Australia, where the view of the Milky Way is best and radio interference is least, its image resolution will be 50 times that of the Hubble Space Telescope. Technology developments in antennas, fiber networks, signal processing, and software and computing place us within reach of surveying the sky thousands of times faster than ever before. But this advance requires high-performance computing and long-haul links with 10 times greater capacity than current global internet traffic. Data collected by the SKA in one single day would take 2 million years to playback on an iPod. This symposium provides an update on the Southern Hemisphere’s flagship scientific instrument, highlighting breakthroughs of more than 70 institutes in 20 countries and their industry partners. It spotlights how the telescope’s design, construction, and operation are having a global impact on skills development in science, engineering, and associated industries. Shared with astronomers worldwide, this initial work is pushing radio astronomy to new heights and asking fundamental questions about our universe.