The giant ear rising in the outback: inside Australia’s SKA-Low, the world’s largest radio telescope

I cover rockets, telescopes and the race back to the Moon from down under, and while the Moon tends to grab the headlines, I want to shine a light on something extraordinary happening much closer to home, out in the red silence of the Western Australian outback, where one of the most ambitious scientific instruments ever built is slowly rising.

I am talking about the SKA-Low telescope, part of the wider Square Kilometre Array project, which is set to become the largest radio telescope on the planet, and the fact that a huge piece of it is being built on our own soil, on Wajarri Yamaji Country, is a genuine source of national pride for Australian science.

A first glimpse of the cosmos

What makes this so exciting is that the telescope is already working, at least in part, because using data from just its first one thousand and twenty four antennas it has produced a remarkable first image, capturing a patch of sky observed at low radio frequencies and revealing eighty five of the brightest known galaxies in that region.

The detail that gives me chills is that each of those eighty five galaxies harbours a black hole at its centre, so this early test image is not just a technical proof of concept but a genuine window onto some of the most powerful objects in the universe, seen through a fraction of the telescope’s eventual power.

Perhaps the most humbling part is the scale of what is still to come, because as one report put it, less than one percent of the world’s biggest radio telescope is currently complete, and yet even that sliver is already dotting our screens with ancient galaxies, hinting at the flood of discovery that lies ahead.

Thousands of antennas in the red desert

The progress on the ground has been steady and impressive, because back in August of 2025 the team completed the final phase of verification testing for the first four antenna stations, made up of those one thousand and twenty four antennas, confirming that every system met its exacting design requirements.

By the end of 2025 the numbers had grown dramatically, with fifteen thousand individual antennas already assembled across the SKA-Low site, transforming a stretch of remote desert into a vast and growing field of simple metal structures that together will act as a single, enormously sensitive ear turned toward the sky.

This is very much a living, working community too, with more than one hundred people spread across the SKA-Low site itself, the Engineering Operations Centre in Geraldton and the Science Operations Centre in Perth, all collaborating to turn a desert full of antennas into a coherent scientific machine.

Why 2026 matters

The reason this year is so pivotal is that by the end of 2026 the array is planned to expand to sixty eight working stations, and at that milestone it will officially become the most sensitive low frequency radio telescope on Earth, a title that will let it peer further back toward the dawn of the cosmos than ever before.

Of course this is a marathon rather than a sprint, since construction of the SKA telescopes is expected to finish by 2028, with the full array eventually spanning more than seventy four kilometres across the landscape by around 2030, a truly continental scale instrument built one antenna at a time.

For me, there is something poetic about the fact that some of humanity’s deepest questions about the early universe may be answered from the quiet heart of the Australian outback, and you can be sure I will keep covering every stage of this giant ear as it opens, one station at a time, to the whispers of ancient galaxies.