Astrophysics (Index)About

Murchison Widefield Array

(MWA)
(low frequency radio telescope)

The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is a radio telescope in Western Australia, operating at 70-300 MHz, aimed at detecting the hydrogen 21-cm line redshifted from the epoch of reionization (much like LOFAR). It is at the Murchison Radio Astronomy Observatory (MRO) north of Perth. An initial phase (MWA-128 or Phase I) was completed in 2012, with a collecting area of 512 square meters in 128 tiles (each tile consisting of a regular 4×4 grid of 16 dipole antennas, in some descriptions the whole tile being termed an "antenna"). In 2017-2018, it was enlarged (Phase II) to 256 tiles, offering baselines up to 5 km. Original descriptions of the MWA were for 512 tiles, so further expansion seems possible, but the correlator has been a bottleneck and a recent effort has been the installation of one capable of processing data from all the current 256 tiles.


(telescope,radio,array,ground,Australia,redshift)
Further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murchison_Widefield_Array
https://www.mwatelescope.org/
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2009IEEEP..97.1497L/abstract
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010rfim.workE..16M/abstract
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018PASA...35...33W/abstract
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019PASA...36...50B/abstract
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2023PASA...40...19M/abstract
https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.04346
WaveLFreqPhoton
Energy
  
999mm300MHz1.3μeVbeginMurchison Widefield Array
4.3m70MHz290neVendMurchison Widefield Array

Referenced by pages:
21-cm experiment
GLEAM
HERA
Low-frequency Array (LOFAR)
phased array

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