After six decades during which it tracked lunar missions, spotted distant pulsars and quasars, and even expanded our concept of the size of the Universe, the Parkes telescope is still going strong.
Australian astronomers are part of a prize-winning team that was the first to pinpoint the location of a fast radio burst. But there is much we still don’t know about these mysterious bursts.
Sunanda Creagh, The Conversation and Antonio Tarquinio, The Conversation
The Dish in Parkes is scanning the southern Milky Way, searching for alien signals
The Conversation50.7 MB(download)
Today we hear about the Parkes radio telescope's role in the search for alien life. Our guide is the irrepressible John Sarkissian, the scientist who's had his eye on The Dish since childhood.
Sunanda Creagh, The Conversation and Cameron Furlong, The Conversation
‘The size, the grandeur, the peacefulness of being in the dark’: what it’s like to study space at Siding Spring Observatory
The Conversation, CC BY54.3 MB(download)
Three hours north-east of Parkes lies a remote astronomical research facility, unpolluted by city lights, where researchers are trying to unlock some of the biggest questions about our Universe.
When Neil Armstrong stepped on to the Moon 50 years ago this month, Australians saw the images first. Australia even defied bad weather to bring the historic images to the world.
In mid 1967, PhD student Jocelyn Bell at Cambridge University was helping to build a telescope. She went on to discover a little bit of “scruff” - the first evidence of a pulsar.
It used to take weeks to find any of these mysterious signals from deep in space but when the new telescope started looking it found one within days. Then another.
You can’t just buy a radio telescope receiver off the shelf. So CSIRO has been hard at work building receivers for the world’s largest telescopes using the very latest technology.