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When the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Observatory goes online later this decade, it will create one of science’s biggest data challenges. The SKA Observatory is a global radio telescope project built in the Southern Hemisphere. There, views of our Milky Way are clearest and the SKA’s remote sites limit human-made radio interference.

The project spans two sites: approximately 131,000 Christmas-tree-shaped antennas in western Australia and 200 large dish antennas in the Karoo region of South Africa. As part of this international collaboration, Canada has established a data-processing centre at the University of Victoria.

Read more:
Canada’s participation in the world’s largest radio telescope means new opportunities in research and innovation

The SKA Observatory will produce around 600 petabytes of data each year. That amount would take 200 years to download using an at-home internet connection of 100 megabytes per second.

This data volume exceeds by a significant margin even what is produced by the Large Hadron Collider, often considered to be the world’s premier big data science project.

Research aims

Among its many science goals, the SKA detects faint radio signals emitted during the Cosmic Dawn, roughly 50 million to one billion years after the Big Bang, when the very first stars and galaxies lit up the universe.

The SKA will also test Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity by timing signals from pulsars (rapidly spinning neutron stars) with high accuracy.

Another goal is understanding fast radio bursts – brief, intense radio pulses from distant sources. The SKA is expected to detect fast radio bursts far more frequently than current instruments, providing a large dataset to help determine their cause, building on work done by facilities like Canada’s CHIME telescope.

Initial data from the SKA is expected in 2027, with the start of major science operations in 2029 as the array is built and commissioned in phases.

Canada’s role

Handling the large volume and complexity of SKA data requires a global network of specialized computing facilities, collectively known as SKA Regional Centres (SRCs).

Canada became a member of the SKA Observatory research project in 2024. Shortly after joining, Canada committed to establishing one such centre.

The Canadian SRC (CanSRC) will be the sole SRC in the Americas, serving as an important node for processing, storing and providing streamlined access to SKA data. It will allow researchers to focus on scientific analysis rather than data management hurdles.

Big Astronomy

The SKA is part of astronomy’s ongoing evolution toward “Big Science,” where international collaboration becomes essential for scientific breakthroughs. This large-scale approach not only changes how science is funded, but also how it is conducted.

While the SKA will still accommodate traditional investigator-led proposals — where individual scientists or small teams request specific telescope time and computational resources for more focused projects — most of its observing power will target ambitious, multi-year projects designed by large international teams.

Canadian researchers participate in all of the SKA Science Working Groups and have co-chaired four of them in recent years. Canada is recognized as a world leader in studies of pulsars, cosmic magnetism and transients, as well as in low-frequency cosmology, areas where the SKA will make some of its most transformative discoveries.

Astronomical data management

Building, developing and managing CanSRC requires collaboration among the National Research Council’s Canadian Astronomy Data Centre, with four decades of experience in astronomical data management; the Digital Research Alliance of Canada, offering high-performance computing resources; CANARIE, operating the high-speed research network for data transfer; and the University of Victoria’s Arbutus cloud platform, supplying the scalable infrastructure.

The project leverages expertise concentrated within the University of Victoria’s Astronomy Research Centre, which brings together researchers from the University of Victoria, the National Research Council Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Centre and TRIUMF, Canada’s national particle accelerator centre.

Importantly, CanSRC ensures that researchers have access to SKA data. The capabilities developed through CanSRC will strengthen Canada’s digital ecosystem for the future.

Digital discovery

CanSRC will serve as a gateway for developing and expanding the use of advanced data methods and algorithms, helping scientists from research and industry sectors harness massive datasets.

Applications of these techniques extend far beyond astronomy, with potential uses in medical imaging, remote sensing and artificial intelligence.

Every living thing needs nitrogen, and the world uses a significant portion of its energy making nitrogen fertilizer for agriculture. Studying microorganisms that naturally capture atmospheric nitrogen – a process called nitrogen fixation – can inspire new sustainable methods to produce fertilizers, saving energy and reducing water pollution.

In a new study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), University of California Berkeley and Northern Arizona University investigated a California river ecosystem and found a nitrogen-fixing bacterium that acts like a proto-organelle, which could provide a roadmap for harnessing nitrogen fixation for agriculture.

“About two percent of global energy use goes toward making nitrogen fertilizer,” said LLNL scientist and author Peter Weber. “If we can mimic nature’s approach and build a nitrogen-fixing organelle, then we can potentially get nitrogen on demand.”

The river ecosystem studied in this work contained three key members: (1) green macroalgae (similar to seaweed), which appear on riverbed rocks in spring and, by summer, grow long filamentous streamers that move with the flow of water, (2) diatoms, or unicellular, golden-brown microalgae, that colonize the surface of the streamers, and (3) nitrogen-fixing bacteria that live symbiotically inside the diatoms as if they were proto-organelles – the precursors to subcellular structures.

To investigate the nutrient exchanges among these ecosystem members, the scientists collected river streamer samples in water and injected heavy isotopes of carbon and nitrogen in the lab. They used nanoscale secondary ion mass spectrometry (NanoSIMS) to visualize the distribution of the newly acquired carbon and nitrogen among the three members. Much like a medical PET scan illuminates organs, these techniques allowed the team to trace the allocation of these essential nutrients in the algae system down to the organelles and proto-organelles.

“Because we have this equipment that’s able to measure the concentration of the isotopes at a very high spatial resolution, you can see where they go at the subcellular level, including in the symbiotic bacteria,” said author and LLNL scientist Ty Samo.

NanoSIMS showed that nitrogen-fixing bacteria get first dibs and the largest serving of the newly acquired nitrogen. They also had some of the highest amounts of newly acquired carbon, alongside the algal chloroplasts where photosynthesis occurs. The bacteria transform atmospheric nitrogen gas into useable, organic nitrogen that is a building block for cell growth – and they likely use the carbon to power that process.

“The macroalgae in river streamers pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere through photosynthesis. The diatoms that live on top of the macroalgae are doing the same thing. The unique thing is that the symbiotic bacteria – which live inside the diatoms – are also fixing nitrogen and helping to support the diatom’s needs,” said author and LLNL scientist Jennifer Pett-Ridge. “These types of bacteria are the only ones that can take nitrogen gas out of the air and turn it into organic nitrogen, a critical resource that all cells and ecosystems need. Their activity eventually supports a whole food web – from frog tadpoles, to snails, aquatic invertebrates and eventually salmon and other fish.”

These miniscule bacteria provide the nitrogen for the entire river food web, from the diatoms to caddisflies that eat the diatom-coated algae streamers to the endangered salmon that eat the caddisflies.

“The bacteria are so tiny, but in aggregate, they have this massive, massive impact,” said Samo.

By studying the symbiosis in more detail, the team hopes to be able to transfer the nitrogen-fixing abilities to other cells that are applicable to bioenergy, agriculture and biomaterials.

Over the past few thousand years, humans have concocted ways to harvest ever more energy, whether from food production or from different sources of mechanical, chemical or electrical energy. The power of humans, beasts, wind, water, wood and more transformed our environment. The aim was often to improve human lives — at least some human lives. Many of these energy systems had large impacts, but they remained mostly local, the widespread extinction of large fauna notwithstanding.

Then, in the 18th century, humans began using industrial quantities of the densely concentrated energy stored in fossil fuels, releasing organic carbon that had been locked away for millions of years. As the use of fossil fuels began to rise, the gases they produced accumulated in the atmosphere. Initially, the environmental impacts of this Industrial Revolution were, like the prior effects of human energy use, largely local: poisoned waterways and smog-filled urban areas. But that changed as humanity’s vast energetic capabilities expanded. It wasn’t just that the local impacts grew larger — the economy grew on the back of this new energy abundance and living standards improved. A truly global, distributed impact of our hunger for energy emerged.

The Extended Biosphere

No period in our history compares to the Great Acceleration that followed World War II, an explosion in globalized human activity driven by population expansion, innovations in technology and communications, and advances in agriculture and medicine. The Great Acceleration is reflected in the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide, water use, manufacturing production, ozone depletion, deforestation, pollution and global GDP, which brought welcome increases in lifespan and living conditions for billions of people. Never before had our reach been truly planetary, extending far beyond local or even regional environments to dominate the entire biosphere of Earth.

We have used the biosphere as an infinitely large repository for extraction of resources and deposition of waste. In this way, we are similar to other species: We harvest resources, process them biochemically and expel the by-products. There are two primary differences. Our access to energy amplifies the scale and speed of what we do. And importantly, we are now cognizant of the planetary transformation we have initiated.

Over the past few decades, advances in Earth-system monitoring and modeling mean we understand this impact and the ways in which it threatens our survival. For more than a year, the average temperature of the planet has been more than 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than the preindustrial average because of our activities, and it is having a noticeable impact on our lives. While it is true that no one decided to heat the planet — there was no purpose beyond the universal and innate biological drive to harness energy — the changes we make to the biosphere are now made knowingly, and thus purposefully.

This makes us something very different from the cyanobacteria that once remade the biosphere. We are planetary actors with purpose. That means we must bear responsibility. Thrillingly, it also means we have the potential to effect positive change.