Science Archived

PARIS: The gadgetry of modern civilization, from mobile phones to garage door openers, is making it increasingly difficult for radio astronomers to peer back into the origins of the universe.

The job of radio astronomers is to try to extract from a hiss of background static the whispers that tell of the Big Bang and the birth of galaxies and stars.

The Square Kilometer Radio Telescope would be 100 times more powerful than instruments in use today, and would enable astronomers to observe the birth of the very first galaxies.

As a science, radio astronomy is barely 30 years old. The ITU, a United Nations body, allowed it about 2 percent of the radio spectrum. But that was before anyone took full account of the expansion of the universe, which astronomers can study by observing a so-called “red shift,” which indicates that the most distant known galaxies are moving away from Earth at speeds approaching that of light.

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