OU Freshers Event: Enabling next-generation radio astronomy with the SKA Observatory

Construction of the SKA telescopes has recently begun. Once completed, the telescopes will consist of hundreds of radio dishes and thousands of antennas, forming two of the most advanced radio telescopes in the world. The SKAO is a global observatory with member countries across the world, and its headquarters are located at the Jodrell Bank site in the UK.

This talk will present an overview of the telescopes and the wide range of science that they will enable, with a focus on the time-domain observing capabilities that will provide unprecedented opportunities for pulsar and fast transient science. The exceptional sensitivity of the SKA telescopes indicates that their pulsar surveys will be able to triple the currently known population of radio pulsars in our Galaxy. In addition, the many simultaneous tied-array beams combined with real-time single pulse detection will ensure instant localisation of any fast transient and enable rapid multi-wavelength follow-up.

Dr. Lina Levin Preston is a pulsar astronomer at the University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics. She completed her PhD at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia in 2012, focussing on searches for pulsars with the Parkes radio telescope. From there, she moved on to a postdoc at West Virginia University in the USA, working with interstellar medium effects of millisecond pulsars in pulsar timing arrays. Since 2015, she has been part of the SKA PSS team at the University of Manchester, designing and building the pulsar search backends for the SKA telescopes.