Magnetic fields billions of light years away offer clues to the nature of intense flashes from the sky known as fast radio bursts.
An artist’s impression of the Double Pulsar system in which the two pulsars orbit each other every 2.5 hours and send out high-energy beams that sweep across the sky.
Image credit: John Rowe Animations/CSIRO
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.
The Parkes radio telescope can detect extremely weak signals coming from the most distant parts of the Universe.
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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.
Today we hear about some of the fascinating space research underway at Siding Spring Observatory – and how, despite gruelling hours and endless paperwork, astronomers retain their sense of wonder for the night sky.
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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.
The Parkes Observatory radio dish, the second largest telescope in the southern hemisphere, has a ‘multibeam’ receiver which can search 13 places in the sky simultaneously for signs of intelligent life.
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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.
CSIRO Parkes radio telescope has discovered around half of all known pulsars.
Wayne England
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.
Antennas of the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) at CSIRO’s Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia.
CSIRO
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.
The Milky Way as seen from Earth.
Flickr/Peter Ozdzynski
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.