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HERA telescope upgrades could reveal the earliest stars
When it first went online in February 2016, the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) radio telescope in South Africa boasted 19, 42-foot-diameter antennas aimed at the "Cosmic Dawn" of the universe. The antennas are designed to detect a specific wavelength of light emitted by hydrogen atoms during what's called the "Epoch of Reionization," which scientists believe started about 400 million years after the Big Bang. By picking up these wavelengths of light, HERA will be able to form a clearer picture of the universe at a time when the first stars and galaxies were being formed, more than 13.7 billion years ago.
IBM: 'We must build an Exascale computer before 2024' (video)
ASTRON has enlisted the help of IBM to lead a five-year, $43 million project to develop and build a supercomputer for the new Square Kilometer Array. The SKA is a $2.1 billion initiative to construct the world's largest radio telescope across a 3,000km strip of Australia or South Africa. It's hoped to be around 50 times as powerful as the dishes we currently point heavenward and will be used to examine the deepest reaches of space to learn more about the formation of the universe. When it goes live in 2024, it'll produce an Exabyte of data each day: twice as much information as there is traffic on the internet in the same period. Of course, no existing computer could handle the job, so Big Blue has a slim 12 years in which to turn nascent technologies like Nanophotonics, 3D chip stacking and phase change memory amongst others into a practical, workable Exascale computer. Its either that, or somehow daisy-chain 100 million PCs with enough power and cooling fans to keep it all working and hope for the best. If you'd like to know more, then head on past the break, although unfortunately it won't count as college credit.
SKA radio telescope to pump out more data than the internet in 2020, spot ALF before he lands
Unfortunately for Desmond Dekker fans, this SKA telescope has nothing to do with the Jamaican music sensation. No, the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) radio telescope has much more otherworldly concerns, and according to the director of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), Peter Quinn, it should have the internet beat in terms of data when it goes online in 2020. The telescope, which will end up in either Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa, is aimed at searching for Earth-like planets, extraterrestrial life, dark matter, and black holes, and will require a central supercomputer with "the processing power of one billion PCs." What's more, it is expected to be 10,000 times more powerful than any telescope in existence and "generate the same amount of data in a day as the entire planet does in a year." We say anything that gets us closer to having our very own hairy, Hawaiian-shirt sporting alien on hand is well worth the $2.1 billion it will cost to create. Willy!
