Murchison Widefield Array - Tile Display

Temporary Exhibition | Updated 1 decade ago

Image courtesy of Natasha Hurley-Walker
Murchison Widefield Array

Come to the WA Museum Geraldton and view one of the “tiles” from the Murchison Widefield Array.

The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is the low-frequency radio telescope precursor instrument to the Square Kilometre Array. It has been developed by an international consortium and is located near Boolardy station in Western Australia, at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) which offers a quiet radio environment and stable climate for observations. It is an inherently versatile instrument with a wide range of potential science goals, one being the detection of neutral atomic Hydrogen emission from the cosmological Epoch of Reionization(EoR).

An MWA antenna comprises four by four regular grid of dual-polarisation dipole elements arranged on a 5m x 5m steel mesh ground plane. Each antenna (with its 16 dipoles) is known as a “tile”. The majority of the tiles (112) will be scattered across a roughly 1.5 km core region, forming an array with very high imaging quality, and a field of view of several hundred square degrees at a resolution of several arcminutes.

This is an activity for National Science Week 2012

Supported by MWA and CAASTRO