31/05/2016 Newsround

Good morning, I'm Ayshah with a special Newsround this Tuesday.

Keep watching to find out about a global project

which is trying to see further into space than ever before.

And how did the first stars and galaxies form?

Two massive questions that scientists are hoping to answer,

with the world's biggest and most powerful radio telescope.

Its HQ will be right here in the UK, but it's being built

This week we'll be telling you about, how it could change our

For thousands of years humans looked to the skies and have wondered what

With our eyes we studied the stars and planets in the night sky, with

Ancient peoples believed the stars had

special powers and built mystical structures like Stonehenge to study

While others learnt to use the sky as a map to help them navigate over

Then came one of the most important inventions in

A simple piece of glass that makes things that are

far away appear close, magnifying the viewing power of our eyes.

Using optical telescopes, we found craters

and mountains on the moon, spots on the sun, and discovered we are

surrounded by other planets in the galaxy called the Milky Way.

But around 80 years ago, scientists began to look into the cosmos

for the things our eyes could not see, when they invented the radio

Sights belonging to the invisible world.

What an optical telescope does is enhances the view

with your eye so if you got with your eye and look

the light goes through your pupil but what telescope does is it

increases the side of your pupils to the other

to a sceptic and collect more light is he things and magnifies its odour

What you see with your eye is the colours of the

rainbow but beyond the rainbow there is a whole lot of information

of information your eye can't see so beyond the red there is

the infrared and then the radio, beyond the Bard is the ultraviolet

and then the x-rays and gamma rays so radio

you see the universe, a completely different view

If humans had radio dishes for eyes we would be

able to see through clouds and as much by day as we do by night.

That is because these telescopes don't see

the stars, but instead see the gas between the stars that produce radio

And now scientists are building an giant radio telescope,

100 times more powerful than the best in the world.

When it's done, it will help us explore what's out

there further than we have ever seen before.

To let us discover new galaxies, how the universe began and

This telescope was built over 50 years ago.

It's still one of the most powerful radio scripts in the world.

But the telescope scientists are working on

now will be 100 times more powerful and the images will be 6000 times

But it won't just be one massive telescope like this.

Thousands of smaller dishes and up to a million antennae, that will be

huddled together over an area the size of 200 football pitches.

The telescopes are being built into main countries, Australia and South

Africa. They will be faster than any system that exists at the moment.

They will be so sensitive, they will be able to pick up signals from

planets that are tens of light years away.

This is the most exciting science project of this early part of the

century. We are going to use it to look backwards in time, write to the

beginning of the universe and to answer some amazing questions such

as are their beings as intelligent as us out there in the universe. All

the telescopes are spaced out, why? You can imagine them being part of a

lens. The further they are apart, the sharper the vision. If you add

up the areas of all of them, that's equivalent to one very big one.

These dishes will be the eyes of the project. And a computer like this

one will be the brain. One of the information from the dishes has to

go somewhere, like this supercomputer being built right here

in the UK. This thing has the power of 1 million home computers. SKA

will see more of the complete picture and could change what we

know about our universe, and life as we know it, forever. This week I

will see where thousands of dishes being built and discover how SKA

could help us talk to aliens. Maybe there is life somewhere, in a solar

system in another galaxy. And you tell us what it's like to be

involved in a project like this.