JUST a few miles from Andover a new radio telescope is being built which will reach far into space and billions of years back in time to help unveil vital new information about how the Universe evolved.

It might even be capable of testing the Big Bang model itself of how the Universe began.

Since April this year project co-ordinator Derek McKay-Bukowski has been living, eating and sleeping at the construction site of the new telescope at Chilbolton Observatory, which should be receiving its first data – or first light – in September.

Working alongside him – as well as students, lecturers and researchers mainly from the universities of Portsmouth, Oxford and Southampton – is Dr Harry Smith of Oxford Astrophysics.

Vast quantities of data are expected, which will be fed into a super computer in the Netherlands as part of the European LOFAR (Low Frequency Array) project, which, when completed, will consist of more than 5,000 antennae in stations all over Europe.

Derek explained that having a number of antennae using digital technology enables them to ‘listen’ to different parts of the Universe without physically moving it.

It will not replace the big dish at Chilbolton, which has a different function, but there are other radio telescopes which it is going to supplant.

And the ways in which the new facility will help to improve our understanding of the Universe are truly amazing.

Derek explained that as our knowledge of the Universe has expanded research has reached out in two directions – one has been further out into space, the other is down to the sub-atomic particle level.

“The Large Hadron Collider at Cern is a forefront experiment in particle physics, we are at the forefront of the astronomical frontiers,” said Derek.

“However, having said that, the particle physicists are effectively refining their quantum theories and are getting down to the equations of everything in the same way that us, at a cosmological level, are also approaching the equations of everything and in some ways we do intertwine backwards and forwards.

“The whole aim is to put all these parts together so that at some point two things click together with what is called the Grand Unification Theory.”

Intriguingly, however, it should also be able to test the Bing Bang theory itself.

Derek said: “According to the theory, what you expect is that the Big Bang starts as an explosion of effectively ionized matter.

“At some point ionized matter will re-condense – in other words it goes back to being just neutral atoms and those neutral atoms are in the Universe, which is continuing to expand.

“As time goes on that matter starts to clump together, just from distortions and perturbations, and matter eventually gets to the point where some starts to collapse down. Once it collapses down it forms a star and once that star ignites it will then cause ionized material again.

“This telescope is the first that’s big enough, and can look at the correct frequencies, to see whether or not you can see that re-ionization occur.

“So, therefore, what this telescope will be able to do is to test whether it is true that there was a Big Bang and that there has then been a condensation and stars forming. “We should see a point at which all the stars have been switched on and that is called the Epoch of Re-ionization.”

That is just a part of what the facility in Chilbolton and Europe will be able to do – and one of the things it might be able to do is search for alien intelligence.