SKA Observatory

28/10/2026

🇳🇱 We’re at the Big Science Business Forum in Maastricht this week! It brings together international big science organisations and industry from across Europe, including several of our partners who are contributing to SKA construction.

This morning our Director-General Prof. Jessica Dempsey took to the stage alongside leaders from ESA, ESO, FAIR and CERN to discuss science, sustainability and the opportunities of working with SMEs.

ESA - European Space Agency ESO Astronomy FAIR GSI - Universe in the Lab CERN

14/10/2026

"Science is all about sharing what you learn about the Universe with other people."

💻💫 We recently welcomed the Astropy coordination team to the SKAO Global Headquarters in the UK. The Astropy project is a large software project developing python tools for astronomy, and is indispensable for our SKA science community.

Hear from Astropy coordinator Dr Erik Tollerud on why open source software tools matter for science.

12/10/2026

💥 The farthest ever fast radio burst (FRB) has been discovered!

South Africa's MeerKAT telescope, an SKA precursor facility, spotted a fast radio burst suspected to be very distant. An international team led by Dr Manisha Caleb from the University of Sydney then used the James Webb Space Telescope to discover just how far - more than 10 billion light years from us, a new record for an FRB! 🏆

With MeerKAT and the SKA telescopes we expect to find even more fast radio bursts to help us decipher these mysterious objects.

Read our partner SARAO's press release here: https://loom.ly/9VIA948

South African Radio Astronomy Observatory - SARAO

📷 Image NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Themiya Nanayakkara (USYD). Image Processing Joseph DePasquale (STScI).

08/10/2026

🛰️🌌 Satellites crossing the night sky above the SKA-Mid telescope underline the need for the sustainable use of the near-space environment.

This composite image forms part of Max Alexander Photographer's Our Fragile Space exhibition, and highlights a new challenge faced by observatories around the world.

The photo was taken in August 2024 over a 10-minute period at dawn, combining 29 individual 20-second exposures stacked into a single frame of the background.

The SKAO continues to work with international partners to address the impact of growing numbers of satellites on astronomy, including as a co-host of the IAU CPS.

ESO Astronomy NOIRLab

Credit: SKAO/Max Alexander/Ian Howarth. Photo taken at the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory - SARAO site in the Northern Cape.

06/10/2026

Congratulations to Prof. Francis Halzen who was today awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory!

This fascinating project sits at the interface between particle physics and astronomy. 🧊 IceCube is detecting neutrinos from extremely energetic phenomena in the Universe. The SKA telescopes will study the same events by the radio emission they create – a great example of multi-messenger astronomy. ✉️💫

BREAKING NEWS
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics to Francis Halzen “for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.”

Francis Halzen realised that ice at the South Pole could be used to track particles known as neutrinos. His vision and scientific leadership have been fundamental for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory – a cubic kilometre of ice that is equipped with light sensors. Using IceCube, researchers can capture neutrinos from extremely energy-rich processes in the distant universe.

Neutrinos are everywhere, but they do not make themselves known. They pass all the way through the Earth and through our bodies without us noticing. Very rarely, a single neutrino will interact with an atomic nucleus, which makes it possible for someone with the right equipment to discover them.

Scientists have long known that the cosmos contains natural particle accelerators, which fire out particles with energies up to a million times more than can be achieved in laboratories on Earth. Much about these sources is mysterious: what are they, where are they, and what are the main processes inside them?

Neutrinos with extremely high energies are created in the same environments as other types of particles. However, unlike other particles, neutrinos reach us without changing direction or losing energy. This means they can provide information that is not available in any other way.

Francis Halzen first presented his vision for capturing neutrinos at the South Pole in 1988. When a neutrino collides with an atomic nucleus, it produces a flash of light that can be tracked by sensors in the clear glacial ice. The South Pole’s ice has many advantages, as it is free from various types of interference and the area is geologically stable, with no earthquakes. Halzen and his idea soon gained the support of other researchers and, just a few years later, preliminary testing was conducted on sensors in ice.

Cosmic neutrinos with extremely high energies are very rare, so an enormous volume of ice is needed to observe an adequate number of collisions. IceCube covers an entire cubic kilometre and was finished in 2011. Researchers soon discovered the first high-energy neutrinos and, a few years later, could publish their discovery of neutrinos that must originate far outside our solar system. The search for the universe’s neutrino sources could begin in earnest.

The neutrino interactions that are continuously collected by IceCube will provide researchers with novel knowledge about the violent settings in which high-energy neutrinos can be created – and could even reveal previously unknown cosmic phenomena.

Learn more
Press release: https://bit.ly/4xYId01
Popular information: https://bit.ly/3T69GgT
Advanced information: https://bit.ly/46V5owe

05/10/2026

How can big science organisations drive and support regional transformation? The German Centre for Astrophysics (DZA), located at the heart of Europe in eastern Germany, will be a hub for SKAO science, but it also has a bigger mission.

We spoke to Dr Stefan Ohm about how the DZA is sharing skills and forming partnerships across the region, to connect with communities that have previously not had a chance to interact with big science.

Read his interview here 👉 https://loom.ly/420-fYo

Reading on mobile? You may find this easier: https://loom.ly/5ErVlqA

Photo credit: Paul Glaser/DESY/DZA

30/09/2026

⏰ Settle in for science time! This image is what a long-period transient looks like before and after some software wizardry.🪄💻

Our commissioning scientists detected this transient during test observations using 14 SKA-Low stations (3,584 antennas), located on Wajarri Yamaji Country in Western Australia. Long-period transients emit huge amounts of energy over time intervals ranging from fractions of a second to hours. This one is active for a few minutes and then goes completely quiet until the next bout of activity, on a roughly 21-minute cycle.

"What long-period transients actually are is still being debated, but some are known to be white dwarfs in a binary system with another 'normal' star," says SKA-Low Commissioning Scientist Dr Sam McSweeney.

"It is almost certain that this one, called GPM J1839-10, is also in a binary system, but what kinds of stars make up the pair is not yet established."

The top image is the original data – notice how the lines are curved. The transient's radio signals passed through a lot of interstellar material (ionised gas) on the way to Earth, slowing them down, with the lower frequencies arriving last. This is called "dispersion" and it's how we can tell the signals are from the cosmos and not human-made radio frequency interference!

Astronomers use software to correct this dispersion, then combine signals by frequency to increase the quality of the observation. The bottom image shows the result: clearer "pulses" which can be analysed to understand the behaviour and properties of the transient.

"This detection is our first step in demonstrating the telescope's capability of detecting and finding new transient astrophysical phenomena on these time scales," says Sam.

"Such a bright detection is only possible by having all of the SKA-Low sub-systems working together and being exquisitely well-calibrated, so we're really excited about the progress we're making with this early array!"

This scientific work uses data obtained from Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, the CSIRO Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory. We acknowledge the Wajarri Yamaji People as the Traditional Owners and Native Title Holders of the observatory site.

CSIRO, The Wajarri Community Office

23/09/2026

📡 2️⃣0️⃣ We've lifted our 20th SKA-Mid dish in South Africa – that's double the number we had six months ago!

Congratulations to the teams on site and across the globe who are supporting this joint effort. 👏

South African Radio Astronomy Observatory - SARAO,
National Research Foundation, Department of Science,Technology and Innovation SA

10/09/2026

🇿🇦 This week we celebrated the 19th big lift of an SKA-Mid dish at the telescope site in South Africa! 1️⃣9️⃣ 📡

While construction continues rapidly, our scientists have been busy commissioning the first four dishes on site, testing and calibrating all the systems that need to work together to observe the sky.

🎬 We caught up with Lead Commissioning Scientist Dr Betsey Adams, who told us more about SKA-Mid's science goals!

04/09/2026

🌌 Exciting cosmology news involving members of the SKA science community and SARAO's MeerKAT radio telescope!

Astronomers directly detected an extremely faint radio signal from hydrogen gas billions of light years away, demonstrating a powerful new way to map the Universe.

More: https://www.uwc.ac.za/news-and-announcements/news/astronomers-use-meerkat-to-directly-detect-faint-cosmic-hydrogen-signal

South African Radio Astronomy Observatory - SARAO, The University of Manchester, UWC Astrophysics Group, The University of the Western Cape

[READ] An international team of astronomers from the University of the Western Cape (UWC) and The University of Manchester has used South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope to directly detect the faint radio emission from neutral hydrogen gas across cosmic distances. The signal, observed from a time when the Universe was several billion years younger than it is today, provides an important demonstration of a technique known as hydrogen intensity mapping.