Why the World’s Biggest Radio Telescope Had to Tweak Nature’s Perfect Sunflower Spiral

What happened

To understand how this happened, first let’s look at what the team was actually doing, since they haven’t started to build the full telescope yet. The evolutionary processes that have created such a diverse panoply of life on Earth can be a great source of ideas in solving technical problems.

Why the World’s Biggest Radio Telescope Had to Tweak Nature’s Perfect Sunflower Spiral By Andy Tomaswick - September 28, 2026 11:27 AM UTC | Observing Scientists love taking inspiration from nature. The branch of SKA in Australia is designed to look at “low” radio frequencies between 50 and 350 MHz and is known as SKA-Low.

Credit - SKA Observatory YouTube Channel One important feature of SKA-Low is its scale, though. That’s over 131,000 individual antennas to make up this part of the system.

So it only makes sense they would want to test them beforehand. In fact, they’ve done so three times now, using specially designed testbeds at Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, CSIRO Murchison Radio-Astronomy Observatory.