As astronomers prepare for the construction of a new radio telescope called the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) in both Australia and South Africa, a new problem arises.

Astronomers are asking how will they handle and interpret all the incoming data pouring out from the new telescope?

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The Square Kilometer Array radio telescope, scheduled to be built by 2018, is expected to have an unprecedented ability to deliver immense amounts of data about the location and properties of stars, including galaxies and clouds of hydrogen gas.

"SKA is so much more sensitive than today's radio telescopes, and so we are making it impossible to do what we have done in the past." said Robert Linder, one of the researchers.

A pixel will store every bit of information about hydrogen clouds, but imagine millions of pixels that usually take 20 to 30 minutes for people to interpret each (pixel).

A team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the U.S. have answered the question by developing software that can be trained to interpret all the data.

The new software will help astronomers to automate the interpretation process of millions of pixels coming from SKA. With this, astronomers will be able to further explore the cosmos in more details and reduce time consumption.

"Suddenly we are not time-limited," said Linder. "Let's take the whole survey from SKA. Even if each pixel is not quite as precise, maybe, as a human calculation, we can do a thousand or a million times more pixels, and so that averages out in our favor."

"We are looking at the Milky Way, because that's what we can study in the greatest detail," Lindner added.

"But when astronomers study extremely distant parts of the universe, they need to assume certain things about gas and star formation, and the Milky Way is the only place we can get good numbers on that."

TagsSquare Kilometre Array (SKA), Automated Data Processing, Astronomy, Australia, South Africa, Radio Telescope, University of Wisconsin-Madison