Senior Research Fellow in Astrophysics leads one of the UK teams granted £15m to build software and computer systems at the heart of a new international radio telescope

Hall Senior Research Fellow Professor Aris Karastergiou and his group at Oxford Astrophysics have been awarded funding to construct an instrument on the Square Kilometre Array, a new and extremely sensitive radio telescope constructed in South Africa and Western Australia.

The instrument will allow the telescope to find a large number of new Radio Pulsars and Fast Radio Bursts. The former are neutron stars with extreme physical properties that allow experiments in fundamental physics, ranging from nuclear and plasma physics to General Relativity. The latter are thought to be extremely luminous bursts originating from distant galaxies, with the potential to give us new insights into the composition and evolution of the Universe. The team have designed a high-performance cluster of computers and the software to perform these searches on an unprecedented scale. One of the objects they are aiming to detect is the first system of a Pulsar orbiting a Black Hole in our Galaxy.

For more information about the government award visit Oxford University’s news article.