In the West Australian desert, an array of radio telescopes has spotted strange radio signals emanating from somewhere near the heart of the Milky Way. These signals don’t fit any known patterns produced by familiar radio sources such as pulsars, quasars or radio galaxies. Instead, astronomers think they could come from a new type of … Continue reading Strange radio waves from the centre of the galaxy
Tag: ASKAP
Mapping the southern skies
In 2022, the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder Telescope in WA will embark on a massive project to map the southern skies in radio waves. This survey, the Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU), will help us understand how the first stars and galaxies formed and evolved. Cosmos spoke to Dr Michael Cowley, an astrophysicist … Continue reading Mapping the southern skies
Dancing ghosts
By Ray Norris, Western Sydney University Scanning through data fresh off the telescope, we saw two ghosts dancing deep in the cosmos. We had never seen anything like it before, and we had no idea what they were. Several weeks later, we had figured out we were seeing two radio galaxies, about a billion light-years … Continue reading Dancing ghosts
New and detailed atlas of the skies
A new radio telescope in outback Western Australia has just created an atlas of the southern sky in record-breaking time, demonstrating that detailed all-sky surveys can now be done in weeks instead of years. Over just 300 hours, CSIRO’s Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) mapped three million galaxies, one million of which we’d never … Continue reading New and detailed atlas of the skies
Astronomers find source of four radio bursts
Fast radio bursts are one of the biggest mysteries in astronomy. The immensely powerful bursts of radiation appear randomly from points in the Universe. They flash without warning, releasing as much energy in the blink of an eye as our Sun will emit in 80 years. They can’t be predicted, and usually occur only once, … Continue reading Astronomers find source of four radio bursts
Closing in on a fast radio burst
Keith Bannister and Shivani Bhandari from Australia’s CSIRO describe how a ‘new killer app’ helped with an important breakthrough.
Engineering the Square Kilometre Array
The largest, most powerful telescope ever conceived – the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), is going to have over a hundred thousand radiotelescopes spread across Australia and South Africa. Its purpose – to look further out into the universe, and further back in time, than any telescope before. It is, quite simply, the biggest astronomy project … Continue reading Engineering the Square Kilometre Array
Australian telescope spies its first burst from beyond the galaxy, many more expected
The ASKAP telescope in Western Australia will collect the mysterious high energy signals known as fast radio bursts with unprecedented ease. Michael Lucy reports.