“We are at risk of a Wild West scenario due to the rivalries between competing space agencies and commercial interests. … A new International space treaty is urgently needed.”
A short picture thread from yesterday's expedition to Raisting Earth Station, in freezing fog (-12℃) and being completely alone there. This station (opened in 1963, still one of the largest in the world) enabled satellite comms between Norh America & Europe for the very 1st time and then was also used for transmitting the moon landing and the 1972 Munich Olympics...
The foggy weather and flat light was almost exactly as I'd hoped for (and been patiently waiting & planning for). It absolutely emphasized the artificiality of these structures in the surrounding landscape. Also loved the design, scale and architecture of some of the antennas. A pretty special place & experience - we shall return!
Tantalizing set of papers, showing potential gravitational wave signal from merging supermassive black holes. Based on decades long monitoring and timing of a set of pulsars with big radio telescopes in Europe (including 100m Effelsberg I used during my PhD), America, Asia, Australia. #EPTA press release: https://www.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de/7918483/epta-jun2023
"A bit of me feels that the horse has bolted and we're in catch-up mode at this point."
But: "There's a social good element to what the satellite operators are doing and you've got to balance that against possible impacts to things like radio astronomy."
Yesterday I gave my first PhD talk at the Astronomical Society of Australia’s Annual Science Meeting on my fav millisecond pulsar - PSR J1713+0747.
The pulsar that threw a tantrum!
Millisecond pulsars are used in pulsar timing arrays as they’re considered stable rotators over the long term. That is vote to helping us search for gravitational wave backgrounds - the big news that we announced last week.
But this very well know millisecond pulsar decided to undergo a massive magnetospheric reconfiguration in 2021 - only the second millisecond pulsar that we know off to exhibit this strange behavior!
In my PhD I will be exploring to see why this happened and if other millisecond pulsars might be doing this on a smaller scale. Maybe they’re not do stable, after all … ask me again in three years!
We now also received national funding for our new radio telescope in #Namibia from #NWO. Together with #European#ERC we have the full budget to build a fantastic telescope to make color movies of black holes and detect cosmic explosions (transients). We work in partnership with European and African partners on the science, but also support a wonderful mobile planetarium program run by local volunteers. #Astrodon#Astronomy#Africa#radioastronomy
A real fascinating story of how an 81-year-old former Air Force chap had come forward to announce he saw pulsars well before they were discovered but could not talk about it for half a century until the military instruments he observed them with were decommissioned and de-classified.
In a nutshell, he was using radar for a Ballistic Missile early warning system and noticed a pulsating signal showing up in his data, which was rising 4 mins earlier each day. He asked astronomers after writing down the location, and it was the Crab Pulsar!
The woman who discovered pulsars, Dame Prof. Jocelyn Bell Burnell - agreed with his discoveries.
Sent this to our team's slack channel overnight, and my supervisor told me he and another one of our team's astronomers were the folks that the Air Force chap got in touch with!
My living room as an antenna test chamber 😂 Well, it was a rainy day, couldn’t set it up outside.
I’m testing a 2.4GHz dish, meant for WiFi links, but as it turns out, it has a decent match at 1420MHz so it’s actually usable as a Hydrogen Line radio telescope antenna.
Traversing in front of it, you can see its impedance (S11 for the experts) change. This happens because I’m affecting its near field. In human understandable terms: being sufficiently close to the antenna affects how it performs.
With my newly acquired LNA, this will likely end up being a much more portable Hydrogen Line radio telescope, I have high expectations 😃
And our results (along with our international colleagues) have dropped!
Our team (and others) have started to see the strongest evidence as yet of the stochastic gravitational wave background - ripples in space-time cause by ALL the supermassive black holes in the history of the Universe colliding!
We use pulsars to study these riplles and we needed almost 20 years of data to even get the first hints! It's the long game!
I'm a co-author on the Aussie papers (as part of my work) but I also wrote about it here in my latest feature article on #SpaceAustralia
This is why I have been going on about pulsars for a few weeks now - this was coming!
"We observe #Starlink#satellites reaching intensities of 10^6 Jy/beam, with the detected transmissions exhibiting a range of behaviours, from periodic bursts to steady transmission. The results are notable because they demonstrate that Starlink satellites are detected in the SKA-Low frequency range, transmitting both intentionally and unintentionally."
Another great ALMA image: a group of researchers led by ProfessorXX studied the triple system IRAS 04239+2436 on the radio signals of sulfur monoxide (SO) and studied the arms generated in that kind of interaction, and compared them with simulations, and the agreement was fantastic.
Another Murriyang (Parkes radio telescope) observation under my belt tonight.
Nearing the end of the semester and almost a year of the project I set up to learn more about my problem child pulsar - a highly magnetised, rapidly rotating neutron star that threw its toys out of the pram.
I’ve already started the analysis (see my next post below) but it’s gonna take a while to get all the data ready.
These are webcam images through our observing portal.
The first SKA-low antennas are being installed today in Australia!
Here's a feature article I wrote (2021) that outlines the road that has led to the development of the world's largest radio telescope for #SpaceAustralia
Bad news for radio astronomy AND optical astronomy. Not only is 'Supplemental Coverage from Space' (aka direct-to-cell) transmission unregulated at this point, but the 2nd generation of #BlueBird satellites will be monstrously large reflectors of sunlight.
#Enshittification of the sky continues: After shitting in optical #astronomy pool, new exciting development appears: to shit all over both optical and #radioastronomy at once!
Whoever can, please send your opinion to FCC. No need to be US citizen. #Sky is for billions, not for billionaires.
♲ mastodon.social/
If you haven't noticed, radio astronomers worldwide are getting very shouty at radio frequency interference (RFI - akin to light pollution) increasing.
We create these multi-billion, grand-scale projects in specifically legislated radio quiet zones away from human populations to ensure we have the best capabilities to detect the faintest signals from the furthers reaches of the cosmos.
Then along comes the RFI from satellite constellations.
I forgot to post this a couple weeks back! It was the 20-year anniversary of one of the first exoplanets
ever found - and it was lurking around a pulsar!
Draugr (Norse for "undead creatures") is one of three planets that orbits the pulsar Lich (also an undead creature).
The official name of the system is PSR B1257+12 and it features the three planets in orbit around the nasty pulsar.
It's located about 1900 light-years away in the constellation Virgo and was discovered in 1994, two years after the first two exoplanets were found around Lich.
The EXTREMELY NEAT thing about Draugr is that, to date, it remains the least massive exoplanet ever discovered, even when compared to the planets in our Solar System - which tells us something!
Found through pulsar timing, its mass is only ~2 times the lunar mass.