A Russian radio receiver that looks and works like a giant white eyeball could help astronomers search far back enough into the early Universe to see the first galaxies forming.

A commercial "Luneburg lens," difficult to obtain in western countries and measuring 3 yards across, arrived in Sydney last week for testing by the Australian scientific agency CSIRO.

An international team of scientists including those from CSIRO hope to use an army of similar eyeball receivers to build the world's next mega-telescope, called the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), which would collect radio waves from the cosmos in patches scattered worldwide. Construction is set to start in 2010.

CSIRO researchers plan to study the Luneburg lens's software so they can design their own spherical collectors for the mega-telescope.

The Luneberg lens is made of polystyrene and operates like an eyeball in two key ways: it focuses radiation to a single point and it can see more than one sky source at a time. Currently, most radio telescopes can see just one source at a time.

The SKA is designed to be 100 times bigger than today's largest radio telescopes, all the better to capture the weak whispers from the early Universe.

Its total collecting area — one square kilometer (.62 miles) or a million square meters — will be comprised of many small surfaces, grouped in patches.

Concepts for the telescope range from arrays of small flat collectors in the ground to a swarm of satellite dishes. CSIRO hopes to advance the lens concept by developing lighter, cheaper materials that absorb less of the precious radio signal.

"These materials can be applied in many other areas of radio and antenna engineering," said Andrew Parfitt of CSIRO Telecommunications and Industrial Physics.

CSIRO is a member of the Australian SKA consortium, which is coordinating Australia's participation in the project.

"We aim to build a 'demonstrator system' of lenses or flat collectors to show that the ideas will work," Hall said. "They'd be built alongside CSIRO's existing Australia Telescope at Narrabri and integrated with it."

This would both test the viability of the technology and make the Australia Telescope uniquely able to see many different parts of the sky at once.

"If we get the funding to do this we'll be letting contracts to Australian industries to build the collecting elements," Hall says.

Australia will unveil these plans at a major international meeting on the SKA that starts on 9 July at the University of California Berkeley.

As well as undertaking technical work, Australia has also begun to test possible SKA sites — the first country to do so. Some initial site testing has been done in Western Australia.

"The site has to meet various technical requirements. One of the most important is being in an area relatively free of man-made radio signals, which can swamp the extremely weak cosmic signals," Hall said. "In this respect, Australia has the edge over many other countries."

"The SKA site will be chosen by the international astronomy community in 2005," Hall says. "They know that Australia would be a good host country — it has an interference-free environment, is politically stable, it's technologically sophisticated and the climate is suitable."

"But we still need to do a lot of groundwork before we put in a bid to host."

The countries currently participating in the international SKA consortium are Australia, Canada, China, Germany, India, Italy, Poland, The Netherlands, Sweden, the U.K. and the United States.