Vic

Telescope of tiles

Far outback in Western Australia, 32 tiles—flat, stationary sensors—each carrying 16 dipole antennas have begun collecting scientific data. These first tiles will ultimately form part of a much bigger array of 512 tiles, the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA)—Australia’s second Square Kilometre Array (SKA) demonstrator project. Like CSIRO’s Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP), the MWA is being [...]

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Managing a data mountain

The world’s largest telescope, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), is expected to generate more data in a single day, than the world does in a year at present. And even its prototype, the Australia SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP), is expected to accumulate more information within six hours of being switched on than has been stored by all previous radio telescopes combined.

Such gargantuan streams of data require serious management, and that will be the job of the $80 million Pawsey High-Performance Computing Centre for SKA Science in Perth. Contracts for the construction of the building to house the Centre are expected to be let in December, 2010.

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PlayStation graphics chips drive astronomy supercomputer

The technology used in your PC or PlayStation is also helping drive a revolution in radio astronomy—the replacement of custom-built hardware with flexible software and data solutions. “Hardware solutions for radio astronomy have been evolving, but computer power has been evolving much faster,” says Matthew Bailes, from the Swinburne Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing. The [...]

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Supercomputers bring theory to life

Over aeons of time cosmic gas comes together, stars begin to form, supernovae explode, galaxies collide. And computational astronomers can watch it all unfold inside a supercomputer. That’s the kind of work post-doctoral fellows Rob Crain and Greg Poole are doing at the Swinburne Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing.

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Stellar immigration

Immigration is a billion year old issue, it seems. Over the past few billion years about a quarter of the globular star clusters in our galaxy-tens of millions of stars-formed elsewhere, and moved into the Milky Way.

So say Prof Duncan Forbes of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne and his Canadian colleague Prof Terry Bridges who used Hubble Space Telescope data to identify the alien stars by the fact that their age and chemical composition differed from their neighbours.

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Nurturing super astronomers at home

Advanced telescopes need advanced astronomers to run them. Australia is matching the millions of dollars it is investing in new telescope technology with funds to help train the rising stars of Australian astronomy. “We’ve had big investments in infrastructure, and now we need young scientists with the expertise to use them,” says Elaine Sadler, professor [...]

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From mapping a continent to surveying the Universe

Australia’s first observatory was built on the shores of Sydney Harbour by Lieutenant William Dawes of the First Fleet, on the point where the southern pylon of the Sydney Harbour Bridge now stands. Optical astronomy was essential for maritime navigation, and for providing precise location measurements for surveying the new continent. The country’s first major [...]

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Measuring the Universe from start to finish

Scientific puzzles don’t come much bigger than these. How old is the Universe? How big is it? And what is its ultimate fate? A single number, Hubble’s constant, is the key that can unlock all of those questions, but it’s a number that has proved notoriously hard to accurately measure. Hubble’s constant is the rate [...]

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Galaxies point the way to dark energy

A project to produce more than double the number of galaxy distance measurements than all other previous surveys combined, could lead to an explanation of one of nature’s biggest mysteries.

In 1998, astronomers announced that the expansion of the universe is not slowing down as many people had thought, but rather is speeding up. To account for this, scientists have invoked an invisible force called “dark energy”, which makes up 75% of the cosmos’ total of energy and matter in the cosmos. Dark energy opposes gravity, and makes the universe want to spread out.

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Starving cancer and other stories

Prostate cancers are made up of hungry, growing cells. Now we’ve discovered how to cut off their food supply thanks to a study published in Cancer Research and supported by Movember. More below. Also Australian science discoveries you may have missed…

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