DARK MATTER WILL BE EXPOSED.

Being an astrophysicist is a bit of a grind: Folks studying the cosmos are absorbed by a universe of equations and formulas, but they don’t often get a chance to test them out—the universe is too darn vast. But that’s going to change. By 2024, a powerful radio telescope (basically, a field of dishes and antennas) will help answer the biggest questions plaguing Earth’s biggest brains. The Square Kilometre Array, located in South Africa and Western Australia, will be the world’s fastest, largest radio telescope—and the closest thing we have to a time machine. With it, scientists will peer back billions of years to observe the first black holes, stars, and galaxies. But that’s not all: It will become our greatest tool in the search for alien life, and test Einstein’s general theory of relativity—that is, our understanding of how time and gravity work. We’ll map billions of galaxies extending to the edge of the observable universe. Most exciting, it will help scientists identify dark matter, the enigmatic material composing 85 percent of our universe.