astronomy

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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Tracing cosmic rays from radio pulses

The energy of ultra-high energy (UHE) cosmic rays that strike the Earth’s atmosphere make the energy produced from particle collisions by the Large Hadron Collider look puny. A team based in South Australia is now developing the techniques and technology to find out where such energetic particles could possibly originate. They ultimately hope to use [...]

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Australia’s SKA demonstrator already booked out

It’s not due to begin operating until 2013, but astronomers from around the world are already lining up to use CSIRO’s Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP). In fact, the first five years of ASKAP’s operation are already booked out, with ten major international Survey Science projects looking for pulsars, measuring cosmic magnetic fields, studying [...]

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Putting Einstein to the ultimate test

Einstein’s theories predicted them, and they could be everywhere throughout the universe. But they’ve never been directly detected. They are gravitational waves, unseen “ripples” in the fabric of space and time.

Scientists using CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope are leading the way in trying to find them, by studying signals coming from pulsars.

Pulsars are the collapsed cores of giant stars that have exploded. Spinning at up to hundreds of times per second, they emit highly-regular radio pulses that appear to flash on and off like a lighthouse. And that’s the key.

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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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Mega star nursery gives birth to new knowledge

Enormous collapsing clouds of cosmic gas and dust may yield clues on how massive stars form, which is an enduring mystery of astronomy. One such cloud, called BYF73, has been studied by a research team using CSIRO’s Mopra radio telescope. Peter Barnes, an Australian researcher working at the University of Florida in the US, leads [...]

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Recording the impact of a super-massive black hole

At the centre of a nearby galaxy lurks an object of huge interest, a super-massive black hole. CSIRO scientists have used their radio telescopes to take a picture of the galaxy surrounding it, a task some thought could not be done, because of the sheer size and radio brightness of the scene. The image of [...]

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Alice Springs—gateway to the stars

Scientists are using the unique advantages of Australia’s Red Centre to conduct high-altitude balloon flights for astronomical research. The clear air and low population of central Australia make it the ideal location for balloon-based research. For most types of astronomy, observatories are typically built high on the tops of mountains, far out in space or [...]

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Japanese spacecraft calls Australia home

On 13 June 2010, a Japanese spacecraft bearing pieces of another world parachuted down to Australian soil after a seven-year-long journey through deep space. During its journey, the spacecraft, called Hayabusa, encountered the 530-metre-long asteroid called Itokawa in November 2005, and briefly landed on it. The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) designed Hayabusa to collect [...]

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