Doubling the number of antennas at the Murchison Widefield Array in a remote part of Western Australia has made the radio telescope 10 times more powerful as it explores the evolution of the universe.
The array is one of four precursor telescopes for the much larger billion-dollar Square Kilometre Array joint-project with South Africa and now has more than 4000 antennas with the completion of its phase two expansion.
John Curtin Distinguished Professor Steven Tingay said the 10-fold increase in power would produce much higher resolution images.
Phase one of the MWA began operations in 2013 and has been surpassing expectations, Prof Tingay said, fuelling more than 100 scientific papers and about 5000 citations.
Recently, astronomers used the MWA to identify our first known visitor from interstellar space.
The 200 metre-long cigar-shaped object, named Oumuamua, was initially thought to be a comet or asteroid, and exactly what it is will remain a mystery as it has left our solar system.
"That was a weird one," Prof Tingay told AAP.
"The MWA has certainly discovered some surprising things.
"We look at everything from what's going on in our atmosphere to determining all of the objects in a our galaxy and the structure of our galaxy.
"The big thing is the MWA looking back in time to the period immediately after the big bang when the first stars and galaxies were forming for the very first time."
Phase one generated an astonishing 20 petabytes of data and the phase two expansion will yield a mind-boggling 80 petabytes of data over the next five years.
"There's a bunch of things that we know about that we're going to learn but probably what is most exciting are the things we can't yet imagine," Prof Tingay said.
The SKA build will begin in 2020 and when complete, it will be 50 times more powerful than phase two of the MWA.
"We're taking our steps along the way to the big game, which will be the SKA," Prof Tingay said.
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