Steven Tingay (INAF)
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is planned to be the most powerful radio telescope on Earth, located in Australia (low-frequency array) and South Africa (mid-frequency array) on exceptionally radio quiet sites. The SKA will target a wide range of key science in astrophysics and cosmology when fully operational, we hope in the first half of the next decade. In the meantime, precursors and pathfinders for the SKA are already operational, the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) and ASKAP in Western Australia, MeerKAT in South Africa, and LOFAR in The Netherlands (and across Europe). In the era of the SKA and its precursors, an area that is rapidly becoming globally important is multi-messenger astrophysics. Advances in astroparticle physics and the direct detection of gravitational waves motivate us to think what the SKA can offer in this area. In this talk, I will introduce the SKA and its precursor telescopes. I will outline some of the work being done in astroparticle and multi-messenger astrophysics by the SKA precursor telescopes. And I will point to opportunities to utilise the SKA in the future.