This radio telescope dish, seen here sitting in its manufacturer’s warehouse in Michigan, US, will form part of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), one of the largest scientific projects ever undertaken. It is a network of thousands of radio telescopes sited across several countries, linked by ultrafast broadband to function as a single gigantic telescope. New Zealand project director Professor Sergei Gulyaev, who took this photo, says that SKA is designed to answer some of the big questions of our time: Was Einstein right about gravity? What is the nature of dark matter? When and how did the first stars and galaxies form? How do Earth-like planets form? Is there life, intelligent or otherwise, elsewhere in the Universe?