Astronomy is one of the oldest sciences, and radio astronomy one of the youngest. Together they tell us where we come from and what the Universe is made of. But the case for building telescopes like the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO) does not rest on curiosity alone. The work needed to design, build and run them produces skills, technology and partnerships that reach far beyond astronomy, and the UK SKA Regional Centre (ukSRC) is part of that story.

Understanding our place in the Universe

Radio waves reveal parts of the Universe that are invisible to ordinary telescopes: cold gas between the stars, the magnetic fields that thread galaxies, and the faint glow left over from the first billion years after the Big Bang. Radio astronomy gave us pulsars, the discovery of the first planets beyond our solar system, and, through the Event Horizon Telescope, the first direct image of a black hole in 2019.

The SKA telescopes will study how the first stars and galaxies formed, test Einstein’s theory of gravity using pulsars, map cosmic magnetism, and search for the chemical building blocks of life around other stars. Knowing more about how the Universe works, and how we came to be here, has a cultural value that is hard to put a price on but that people across the world clearly share.

Technology that ends up in everyday life

Building instruments at the edge of what is possible forces engineers to invent things that later find a use elsewhere. Radio astronomy has a strong track record of this:

  • Wi-Fi. The wireless networking most of us use every day grew out of radio astronomy. Techniques developed at Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, to handle reflected radio signals led to the patents behind modern Wi-Fi. By 2012 CSIRO had licensed the technology to 23 companies and the patents had earned more than US$430 million.
  • Medical imaging. The mathematics of turning faint telescope signals into sharp images has fed into the development of medical scanners, including techniques used in CT and MRI.
  • Navigation and timing. Very Long Baseline Interferometry, a radio-astronomy method of combining telescopes across continents, underpins the reference frame and precise timing that satellite navigation and global positioning rely on.
  • Big data, cloud and AI. The SKAO will produce hundreds of petabytes of data every year. Handling it is driving advances in cloud computing, data management and machine learning that can be applied in healthcare, climate science and industry. This is exactly the kind of work the ukSRC carries out, and our knowledge exchange activities are designed to pass those methods on to UK industry and other research fields.

Skills and the economy

Projects on this scale need people who can write software, manage enormous datasets and build complex hardware. Training them creates a workforce whose skills are in demand right across the economy, not only in research.

Hosting the SKAO brings measurable benefits to the UK. The SKAO’s Global Headquarters sits next to the historic Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. According to the SKAO:

  • Every £1 the UK spends on running the headquarters leverages an estimated £5.67 of foreign direct investment into the country.
  • Hosting the headquarters is expected to unlock around £225 million of foreign direct investment and around £280 million of additional UK gross value added between 2021 and 2030.
  • UK organisations have already been awarded around €122 million in construction contracts for the telescopes, more than the UK’s capital contribution, across software, cryogenics, timing and other systems.
  • Staff at the headquarters contribute an estimated £6.2 million a year to the local economy in Cheshire East.

A global effort, shared widely

The SKAO is an intergovernmental organisation that brings together sixteen countries, with telescopes hosted in South Africa and Australia. Large scientific facilities like this are a form of long-term international cooperation, building working relationships between nations and institutions that last for decades.

They also help to spread scientific capacity. The Development in Africa with Radio Astronomy (DARA) programme, a UK–South Africa partnership running since 2015, has trained more than 320 students, several of whom now lead teaching at African universities. More broadly, the International Astronomical Union’s Office of Astronomy for Development uses astronomy as a tool to support education, skills and economic development. Since 2013 it has funded more than 200 projects and reached over two million people in 112 countries.

Inspiring the next generation

Few subjects draw people into science the way astronomy does. A picture of a galaxy or a question about whether we are alone can be the first step towards a career in engineering, computing or research. The ukSRC supports training, outreach and public engagement that bring radio astronomy and the work of the SKAO to students, teachers and the wider public across the UK.

The ukSRC’s part in this

The UK SKA Regional Centre is where much of this comes together in the UK. We are building the data infrastructure that will let researchers store, access and analyse SKAO data; developing the skills of the people who will use it; keeping that data and software open and reusable through FAIR principles; and sharing the technology and methods we develop with industry and other fields. Through a national programme, we also support UK astronomers using the SKAO precursor and pathfinder telescopes, such as MeerKAT, LOFAR and e-MERLIN, so the community can build skills and do new science now, ahead of the SKAO itself. In doing so, the ukSRC turns a world-leading telescope into lasting benefits for science and for society.

References and further reading