On the occasion of the first meeting of the SKA Observatory Council (SKAO) which took place on 3 and 4 February 2021, France expressed its wish to become a member of this intergovernmental organization whose role is to ensure the construction and then the operation of the future giant radio telescope for the next 10 to 20 years.
The Paris Observatory - PSL salutes this will.
The Paris Observatory - PSL occupies an important place in the national system of preparation for SKA, both scientific and technological, with many researchers and engineers involved in this ambitious project, in particular in the preparation of the processing and analysis of the large volumes of data that will be produced by SKA.
The teams of Paris-PSL Observatory have designed and developed the NenuFAR radio telescope, inaugurated in 2019 at the Nançay radio astronomy station in Cher, which has received the SKA "pathfinder" label. NenuFAR, while exploring important scientific questions such as the birth of galaxies or the radio emission of exoplanets, prepares the French scientific community to make full use of SKA.
SKA, the future giant of world radio astronomy
SKA will be the most sensitive radio astronomy instrument ever designed, over an unparalleled range of radio waves. It will be 50 times more sensitive than the largest of today’s radio telescopes, the Very Large Array (VLA) located in the United States.
With its unrivalled observing capabilities, SKA will enable major advances in :
- The study of the appearance of the first light sources in the Universe, the formation of the very first stars and galaxies, shortly after the Big Bang;
- the impact of magnetic fields on the evolutionary processes of celestial objects, the testing of the theories of gravitation and general relativity or the detection of gravitational waves.
SKA is also expected for its ability to explore the unknown.
SKA’s most spectacular technological challenge is posed by the flow of data it will produce, surpassing each year today’s global internet traffic and the current storage needs of Facebook for example.
For the first time, supercomputers for data processing will become an integral part of the telescopes, just like the antennas, making SKA the first "Big Data" observatory.
La Maison SKA-France
The French scientific community involved in the operation of SKA is expected to exceed 400 researchers in the fields of astrophysics, cosmology and fundamental physics. Scientists from other fields will be involved in numerical, technological, methodological and societal research issues.
The French community wishing to contribute to the SKA project gathers :
7 public institutions:
- CNRS
- Paris Observatory - PSL,
- Observatory of the French Riviera
- University of Bordeaux
- University of Orleans
- INRIA
- CEA
and 7 companies :
- Air Liquide
- ATOSBull
- Callisto
- CNIM
- FEDD
- Kalray
- Thales
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)