Canadian Participation in the Square Kilometre Array

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The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is a global project to design and build a next-generation international radio telescope operating at metre to centimetre wavelengths. With a collecting area of up to 1 million square meters spread out over 3000 km, the SKA will be a unique world facility, and one of the largest scientific projects ever undertaken. By exploiting advances in information and communications technologies the SKA will image vast volumes of the Universe 10,000 times faster than any imaging telescope ever built. It is designed to answer some of the big questions of our time: what is Dark Energy? Was Einstein right about gravity? What is the nature of dark matter? Can we detect gravitational waves? When and how did the first stars and galaxies form? What was the origin of cosmic magnetism? How do Earth-like planets form? Is there life, intelligent or otherwise, elsewhere in the Universe?