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Why the World’s Biggest Radio Telescope Had to Tweak Nature’s Perfect Sunflower Spiral
Scientists love taking inspiration from nature. 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. One such example is the pattern of sunflower seeds - they are arranged in a mathematically optimized pattern known as a Vogel spiral, and the international team building the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) in Australia decided to lay out their antennas in a similar pattern. But, as they report in a paper recently published in the Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems, when they did so they found a huge blind spot in the data which hints that maybe this particular natural pattern might need to be modified to work well for this particular application.
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