The first council meeting of the Square Kilometre Array Observatory has actioned plans that will lead to the biggest telescope on Earth being assembled over the coming decade.

Member states approved a thousand pages of documents covering everything from the power to open a bank account to engaging with industrial contractors.

The SKA telescope will comprise a vast formation of radio receivers.

These will be positioned across South Africa and Australia.

The array’s resolution and sensitivity, allied to prodigious computing support, will enable astronomers to address some of the most fundamental questions in astrophysics today.

How did the first stars come to shine in the Universe? What exactly is “dark energy” – the mysterious form of energy that appears to be driving the cosmos apart at an accelerating rate? And even the most basic question of all – are we alone? The SKA’s unprecedented sensitivity would pick up any extra-terrestrial transmissions.

Jodrell Bank in the UK is the HQ, but Covid meant the council meeting was held online

The international treaty that underpins the new observatory came into force just last month, which enabled this first council meeting – conducted online because of Covid – to finally move forward on a project that has been more than 30 years in the formulation.

“I think of this council meeting really as marking the birth of the observatory,” said Prof Phil Diamond, the SKAO’s inaugural director general.

“We became a legal entity on the 15th of January following the UK’s ratification of our convention. But at that stage, we were an empty vessel. And it’s this first council meeting that is triggering everything that enables us to start filling that empty vessel,” he told BBC News.

The council has approved a whole series of policies, regulations and procedures that will make the observatory real.

A key next step, of course, is to build the telescope.[…]