Qualla: Murchison Widefield Array

Murchison Widefield Array: Introduction

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Calistemon, CC BY-SA 4.0. An undergraduate student named Tyrone O'Doherty was sifting through archival data from the Murchison Widefield Array when he found something no one had seen before: a radio source 4,000 light-years away in the constellation Norma, pulsing brightly for up to a minute every 18 minutes and 11 seconds. Published in Nature in January 2022, the object -- designated GLEAM-X J162759.5-523504.3 -- matched no known category. It might be a magnetar. It might be something entirely new. Either way, it was the kind of discovery that happens when you build a telescope designed to see wide rather than deep, and then point it at everything.

Image: Calistemon | CC BY-SA 4.0

Murchison Widefield Array: Spider Webs in the Dust

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SeanMack, CC BY-SA 3.0. The MWA does not look like a traditional telescope. There are no towering dishes or domed buildings. Instead, 256 antenna tiles lie flat against the red earth of the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, 800 kilometres north of Perth. Each tile is a four-by-four grid of crossed ...

Image: SeanMack | CC BY-SA 3.0

Murchison Widefield Array: Hunting the First Light

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Natasha Hurley-Walker, CC BY-SA 3.0. The MWA's primary scientific target is one of the most elusive signals in cosmology: the redshifted 21-centimetre hydrogen line from the Epoch of Reionization. Roughly 13 billion years ago, the first generation of stars and galaxies ignited and their ultraviolet radiation gradual...

Image: Natasha Hurley-Walker | CC BY-SA 3.0

Murchison Widefield Array: Built in Phases

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Natasha Hurley-Walker, CC BY-SA 3.0. The array grew incrementally. A 32-tile prototype operated from 2007 to 2011, testing hardware and making initial observations. Phase I, with 128 tiles, was completed in late 2012 and fully commissioned on 20 June 2013 at a cost of A$51 million. Phase II doubled the tile count to...

Image: Natasha Hurley-Walker | CC BY-SA 3.0

Murchison Widefield Array: Plasma Tubes and Cosmic Maps

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Patrick McCauley Mccauley.pi, CC BY-SA 4.0. Beyond the headline discoveries, the MWA has generated a steady stream of results across astrophysics. In 2015, undergraduate student Cleo Loi used MWA data to make the first detection of plasma tubes in Earth's ionosphere -- elongated structures of charged particles drifting ove...

Image: Patrick McCauley Mccauley.pi | CC BY-SA 4.0

Murchison Widefield Array: A Global Collaboration on Remote Soil

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Виктор В, CC BY-SA 3.0. By 2024, the MWA consortium had grown to 30 partner organizations across six countries -- Australia, the United States, Canada, Japan, China, and Switzerland -- with 243 individual scientists contributing to its research programs. Curtin University in Perth leads the project, wit...

Image: Виктор В | CC BY-SA 3.0