This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: SKA-Low is a radio telescope under construction in Western Australia. It will operate across a wide frequency range, from 50 to 350 MHz, and will be the most sensitive telescope of its kind ever built.
The completed instrument will link 512 stations spread across an area roughly 75 km (47 miles) wide. Each station's antennas work together like a single large dish, so their arrangement directly shapes what the telescope can detect. An earlier prototype station, AAVS2, arranged its antennas in a scattered, pseudo-random pattern to avoid unwanted signal artifacts.
But antennas placed too close together can interfere with one another, a problem known as mutual coupling. This interference grows stronger below about 150 MHz, squarely within SKA-Low's operating range. To address this, researchers at the observatory proposed a new arrangement inspired by the spiral pattern seen in sunflower heads, known as the Vogel layout.
Spacing the antennas this way reduces interference between neighbors while preserving the station's collecting power. The SKA Observatory built a new prototype station, AAVS3, using this layout to test it under real-sky conditions. As reported in the Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems, researchers led by Dr.
Shin'ichiro Asayama of the SKA Observatory describe how they built and tested AAVS3 and what the results mean for the telescope's final design. The team combined computer simulations with observations to check the station's sensitivity and calibration accuracy. AAVS3 uses 256 dual-polarized antennas and was tested both as a signal-combining beamformer and as an imaging array.
The researchers pointed it at the sun, bright cosmic radio sources, the galactic plane and several pulsars. They also developed two ways to calibrate the station—correcting the raw data so they accurately reflect the sky. The simpler method used the sun as a known reference point.
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