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Scientists are building the world’s biggest radio telescope that can tune in to any period of the history of the universe.

With a start-up cost of £500million the giant telescope will collect in a year more than 70 times the amount of information that moves across the Internet in a 12 month period, and be controlled from the UK.

Next month Britain and 10 other world governments meet to thrash out plans for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).

The scheme will link thousands of radio dishes and antennae spread across Southern Africa and Australia.

It is hoped that by looking into deep space the telescope will be able to pick up any civilisation advanced enough to have developed radio communication.

It will be able to focus in on bands of time light years away.

But it will also be able to hone in on the period of time 13.7 billion years ago when the Universe began with the Big Bang.

The telescope will be run by scientists from Manchester University based at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire.

Professor Michael Diamond said: “We should be able to get back to within half a million years of the Big Bang to the Cosmic Dawn when the universe cooled enough to create matter and create the first stars.

“It was a crucial time in the evolution of the universe but we know very little about it.

“We are the biggest computation and data project on Earth outside the secret sectors. We don’t know what GCHQ has or America’s National Security Agency but they are huge. The SKA will dwarf everything else.”