Australians join Square Kilometre Array tests Willem van Straten with an artist's impression of the Square Kilometre Array. Albert Einstein's theory of relativity will be put to the test like never before, using dead stars and an instrument designed by Australian researchers. The instrument, known as a pulsar signal processor, will be a key part in the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope, the largest of its kind in the world. Swinburne University has secured $638,000 in federal funding to design the processor, which is essentially a super computer built to crunch the masses of data generated from studying pulsars. Pulsars are the burnt out cores of dead stars and are useful for studying gravity - and testing Einstein's theory. They could also help further explain mysterious black holes. "We want to push Einstein's theory of gravity to the limit because his theory doesn't explain it to the level that we expect," said Swinburne University computer scientist and astrophysicist Willem van Straten. Scientists want to break a theory and come up with a better theory. Dr van Straten said pulsars had a powerful magnetic field. They are massive, dense and spin rapidly: hundreds of times a second. The radio noise emitted by a pulsar as it spins can be picked up by the SKA telescope and studied to establish the pulsar's properties. It's like having a ticking clock in space. We measure how that clock is moving, allowing us to study gravity," he said. The faint signal from the pulsars will need to be sorted from other noises in space, including space weather, which can dominate the soundscape. "Overcoming that noise, characterising it and removing it from our data, will be a big challenge," he said. Developed by Einstein between 1907 and 1915, the theory of relativity remains the best explanation of gravity. Quantum mechanics describes what happens at an atomic level. But the two theories don't interact well. "There's no one theory that ties them both together, although people expect there to be a quantum theory for gravity," Dr van Straten said. Without the theory, scientists are not sure how best to describe black holes in detail. By studying pulsars, researchers hope to better understand black holes and, therefore, gravity. They are hoping to find a pulsar in orbit around a black hole and use its timing to study space time in the vicinity of that black hole. Scientists working with the SKA will also search for gravitational waves in order to test Einstein's theory of relativity. Once data begins streaming in 2020, the $2.5 billion SKA will present the best chance of answering other big questions, including how our universe formed and if there is life beyond Earth.