Australian researchers are taking the twinkle out of stars for the world’s biggest light telescope, the Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile.
And a new optical fibre – which can only be made in Australia – could detect corrosion in the metal of aircraft bodies, ships and bridges.
Hear about these stories and more at the national physics and optics congress in Sydney – AIP/ACOFT 2012, at the University of New South Wales, Kensington this week.
AIP/ACOFT 2012, the joint Australian Institute of Physics Congress and the Australian Conference on Optical Fibre Technology, is at the University of New South Wales, Kensington until Thursday 13 December.
Also at the conference today:
- The status of women in science is poor and getting worse, especially at Australia’s leading universities – the Group of Eight. Even fewer women are going in to physics. Why? Three influential women physicists consider the issues at a session today.
- A group of prize winning high school students will meet Nobel Prize winner Brian Schmidt, presenting their work as a warm-up to his lecture. They’ve won a school competition for their experiment on water ripples.
Stop twinkling little star
Australian researchers are taking the twinkle out of stars for the world’s biggest light telescope, the Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile.
The first of seven mirrors has just been made for the largest optical telescope ever built. The mirrors are each 8.4m across but they’ll need new Australian technology presented at the congress today to take clear images.
Any telescope on land is affected by wind and turbulence in the atmosphere, which distort the image. A star should look like a nice circle, but looking through a telescope as huge as the GMT, they’ll just be a ‘speckly mess’.
Scientists from ANU are designing a system which will tell the seven mirrors how to bend to counteract the ‘twinkle’ for a clear image. Thanks to this Australian-made adaptive optical system, images from the GMT will be sharper than even the Hubble Space Telescope.
An aircraft wing that knows when it is corroding
A new optical fibre – which can only be made in Australia – will be presented at the national physics congress in Sydney today.
Roman Kostecki, a PhD student at the Institute of Photonics and Advanced Systems at the University of Adelaide, has created a fibre that can sense its target at any stage along its entire length – and tell you where along the fibre it was found.
In partnership with the Defence Science and Technology Organisation, Roman is working on using his innovation to detect corrosion in the metal of aircraft bodies by the presence of aluminium ions when light is sent down the fibre. It could also be used in other metal structures such as ships and bridges.
The new technology will also have thousands of other applications, for example:
- in the body detecting proteins or enzymes
- in food plants, in water or the air detecting pollution or dangerous pathogens
There is already international interest in the applications of this Australian technology.
Warning airline crew about bad solar weather
When the Sun sneezes, the Earth is dosed with radiation.
For airline crews, who spend their working day in the upper atmosphere, that’s a concern.
Marc Duldig from the University of Tasmania talks about a system of detectors which would warn us when the solar weather’s looking bad.
Australia’s new radio telescope open and booked out
Australia’s adventure with the world’s largest radio telescope has begun – last month the Australian SKA Pathfinder telescope started looking at the skies in outback Western Australia.
Get an update today on construction of the rest of our share of the Square Kilometre Array from CSIRO’s SKA Project Scientist Dr Lisa Harvey-Smith.
The sensitive wide-angle detectors on the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope are able to study large chunks of sky rapidly and in unprecedented detail, opening up new opportunities for astronomers.
Already 10 collaborative teams of astrophysicists are being formed to study various aspects of the structure of the universe, and 493 astronomers have proposed projects involving 4300 days—nearly 12 years—of observing.
ASKAP and a second precursor telescope to study low frequency radio sources, the Murchison Widefield Array, are now undergoing commissioning to be fully operational next year. ASKAP is planned to become an integral part of the SKA when it is built.
Lisa Harvey-Smith will be speaking on the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder in Room CLB 4 at 1.30 pm on Wednesday 12 December.
Also at the conference today:
- The status of women in science is poor and getting worse, especially at Australia’s leading universities – the Group of Eight. Even fewer women are going in to physics. Why? Three influential women physicists consider the issues at a session today.
- A group of prize winning high school students will meet Nobel Prize winner Brian Schmidt, presenting their work as a warm-up to his lecture. They’ve won a school competition for their experiment on water ripples.
Coming up tomorrow, the last day of the congress, we have:
- harvesting energy with algae
- keeping time with sapphires – in atomic clocks and submarines
- what’s the latest on the Higgs
- mobile phone photonics
- and more.