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How a radio telescope doubled its power to glimpse the universe's first galaxies
S. J. Tingay, M. Johnston-Hollitt, R. B. Wayth, T. A. Booler, J. Jones, Y. Wu, J. Gan, G. Sleap, A. McPhail, C. Wintle, A. Williams, C. J. Phillips, L. Verduyn, D. Emrich, P. Giersch, C. J. Riseley, S. Duchesne, C. M. Trott, D. Null, B. W. Myers, C. D. Nunhokee, N. Barry, L. Dressler, J. Ducharme, B. Hazelton, M. Lee, E. Lilleskov, M. Morales, J. Pober, Zhiqiang Shen, Xiang-ping Wu, Xiaoyu Hong, M. D. Filipović, S. E. Tremblay, M. Walker
June 1, 2026
The Murchison Widefield Array in Australia completed a major upgrade: new digital receivers and a faster correlator now let it use all 256 antenna tiles simultaneously, whereas before it could only process 128 at a time. This doubles sensitivity and quadruples the number of independent measurements, dramatically improving its ability to detect faint radio signals from the universe's first galaxies during reionization.
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