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A remote outback station about 800km north of Perth in Western Australia is one of the best places in the world to operate telescopes that listen for radio signals from space.
It’s the site of CSIRO’s Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) and is home to three telescopes (and soon a fourth when half of the Square Kilometre Array, the world’s largest radio telescope, is built there).
But it’s important these telescopes don’t pick up any other radio signals generated here on Earth that could interfere with their observations.
That’s why the observatory was set up with strict rules on what can and can’t be used on site.
RAY NORRIS, THE CONVERSATION
20 DECEMBER 2020
At the very largest scale, the Universe consists of a cosmic web made of enormous, tenuous filaments of gas stretching between gigantic clumps of matter.
Or that s what our best models suggest. All we have seen so far with our telescopes are the stars and galaxies in the clumps of matter.
So is the cosmic web real, or a figment of our models? Can we confirm our models by detecting these faint gaseous filaments directly?
Until recently, these filaments have been elusive. But now a collaboration between Australian radio astronomers and German x-ray astronomers has detected one.
By Ray Norris, Professor, School of Science, Western Sydney University Ray Norris, Author provided
At the very largest scale, the Universe consists of a “cosmic web” made of enormous, tenuous filaments of gas stretching between gigantic clumps of matter. Or that’s what our best models suggest. All we have seen so far with our telescopes are the stars and galaxies in the clumps of matter.
So is the cosmic web real, or a figment of our models? Can we confirm our models by detecting these faint gaseous filaments directly?
Until recently, these filaments have been elusive. But now a collaboration between Australian radio astronomers and German x-ray astronomers has detected one.
Bad Space Weather May Make Life Impossible Near Proxima Centauri 17/12/2020
Featured image: Artist’s depiction of a flare-coronal mass ejection event on Proxima Centauri. Photo: Mark Myers, ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), Author provided
If you look up in the southern sky you can see the “pointer” stars, pointing towards the Southern Cross. One of these pointers is Alpha Centauri, which is actually a pair of Sun-like stars that are too close together to tell apart by eye.
There is a third member of the Alpha Centauri system as well: Proxima Centauri (Proxima Cen for short), which circles the central two stars in a wide orbit. This is the Sun’s nearest neighbour, at a distance of just 4.2 light years.