Define radio silence
There are other factors that make the site special: it has a great view of the galactic centre of the Milky Way, as well as being a good distance from both the south pole and the equator, to limit disruption from the ionosphere.
There are several factors that make the site special: it has a great view of the galactic centre of the Milky Way, for example, as well as being a good distance from both the south pole and the equator, to limit disruption from the ionosphere.
But the radio pollution from the on-site control centre is close to zero. It’s a long way to go out if you need the toilet. To get to the computers you need to go through two “radio locks”, carefully closing the door behind and huddling in a dim and claustrophobic space until you’re allowed to open the next door. There are even special filters on the air vents. Super-computers do make radio noise, so the on-site control centre is wrapped in two radio-proof skins. It’s transformed from analogue to digital signals by two highly specialised super-computers before getting shipped downstream to Geraldton and then south to the Pawsey super-computing centre in Perth. The site, the ancestral home of the Wajarri Yamatji people, is largely empty bush, but it has a bunch of different arrays, peeking here or there from the scrub or, in the case of its 36 big white dishes, towering grandly over the land.Īll the data collected from the different kinds of antenna and dishes, gets a first process on the site.
#DEFINE RADIO SILENCE BLUETOOTH#
Televisions are brutally stripped of their wifi and bluetooth capabilities here before anyone is allowed to turn them on.Īnd this is still 45 minutes’ drive from the site proper, which is protected from radio noise by most everything state and federal legislation can throw at it. Anyone approaching is asked to turn off all electronic devices (nothing can be done about the cars).Īt Boolardy homestead, the base camp for the observatory, there is strictly no wifi (although it has excellent internet access thanks to the large internet cable that for operational reasons runs between the site and Geraldton).
Long before you get to Boolardy, the 346,000-hectare pastoral station on which the Murchison observatory stands, the radio-quiet restrictions start. So visitors must be prepared for, scheduled in and accounted for when looking at the data this place produces. Obliterating, even.īut people need to work at the site, at least during the day, and others need to visit. And visitors inevitably make radio noise because they use electronic devices, and all electronic devices make radio waves.Ī car starting or an electronic camera clicking or a mobile phone searching for reception are much louder to the equipment here than any distant galaxy. If you’re studying radio waves – really old, weak ones from the dawn of the universe – what you don’t want is lots of people making very loud radio noise really close up. is going to be the thing you have not thought of Dr John Morgan Quiet, please It’s the unknown unknown.” The thing that SKA will be remembered for. It’s going to be the thing you have not thought of. On SKA’s website, there is a list of five things the telescope will look into, but as Dr John Morgan, a tall, cheerful astronomer from Curtin University, puts it: “You can guarantee that the thing that SKA will be remembered for – is not on that list. It will also allow us to dig down into the ancient history of our universe, and there’s no knowing what it will find there, or what it will mean for us. The SKA will be able to spot the equivalent of an airport radar system on one of those very, very distant planets. Right now we can spot planets circling around distant stars. The telescope will be perhaps 10,000 times more powerful than any we currently have, and we will need a supercomputer more advanced than anything yet built to analyse the data it produces. At Murchison alone there will be 130,000 radio antennas in the first phase, and maybe a million in the second, taking care of the lower frequency end of the project. Once the project is properly under way – with arrays at this site and another in a remote area of South Africa – it will in effect make up the biggest radio telescope the world has seen.
Murchison is already arguably the most happening radio astronomy site in Australia, and soon it will be home to the most expensive and advanced radio astronomy project in the history of humankind: the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). This is where you will find the Murchison radio-astronomy observatory (although drop-ins are heavily discouraged), spread out over many kilometres of what used to be a simple cattle farm. But this is an extremely unusual place, rich in something very precious: radio quiet.