ZHAW Organizes 9th Swiss SKA Days

(CONNECT) The ZHAW is expecting over 100 national and international participants at the 9th Swiss SKA Days from August 25 to 27, according to a press release. The engineers and scientists from numerous countries are involved in the construction of the SKA Observatory (Square Kilometre Array Observatory, SKAO), the future largest and most modern radio telescope in the world, and will exchange information on the status of their work. Representatives from SKAO's global headquarters are also expected to attend at the Jodrell Bank Centre at the University of Manchester.

"The SKAO is a next-generation big data facility for radio astronomy that will revolutionize our understanding of the universe and the laws of elementary physics," says the SKAO. "Thanks to cutting-edge technology, it is expected to have a major impact on society, science and beyond."

Construction of the SKAO began last year and will take a total of eight years. It comprises two complementary locations in Australia and South Africa, operating sites and the headquarters. The SKA Days include presentations on the status of this international project. Various project groups from the SKA Switzerland Consortium(SKACH) will be presenting their work there.

"We are also working with the University of Zurich, which is responsible for providing the simulations, with the FHNW, which is developing a digital twin of the actual telescope, and with other institutions such as ETH Zurich, EPFL, the University of Basel, the University of Geneva, the University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland and the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS)," says Elena Gavagnin from the ZHAW in a blog interview from her university. Together with Frank-Peter Schilling and Philipp Denzel, she contributes her expertise in AI and machine learning to the consortium in the ZHAW research project GenAI4SKA.

"When the SKAO telescopes become operational, they will produce an overwhelming amount of data - far more than a person could examine in a lifetime," explains Denzel in the same interview. "Our models could help to process this flood of information autonomously, create theoretical representations of galaxies and mark the most exciting discoveries for closer examination." ce/mm