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.
Read the full article →
Far outback in Western Australia, at the Murchison Radio Astronomy Observatory located on Boolardy Station, 315 km north-east of Geraldton, 32 tiles each carrying 16 dipole antennas have begun to collect scientific data on the Sun. At the same time they are providing engineering information to be used to extend the facility to a much bigger array of 512 tiles-the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA).
The MWA is designed to study radio sources at low frequencies, a poorly known part of the radio spectrum between 80 and 300 megahertz. It will be one of the world’s first telescopes without any moving parts. In fact, the array is ‘steered’ electronically, which means the direction the telescope points depends entirely on how the signals from its stationary antennas are combined and processed.
Read the full article →
