In this fabulous episode we are speaking with Dr Stas Shabala, who is an international astrophysicist and a Lecturer in Physics at the University of Tasmania.
Listen: https://soundcloud.com/astrophiz/astrophiz-79-dr-stas-shabala
Stas uses powerful radio telescopes from all over the world and at the nearby Mt Pleasant facility, he investigates AGN Radio Jets & galactic evolution, and we are going to dive deep into Geodetic VLBI, (Very Long Base Interferometry) and we talk about the Radio Galaxy Zoo Citizen Science Project that Stas has been involved in right from the start.
Then for observers and astrophotographers Dr Ian ‘Astroblog’ Musgrave , in ‘What’s Up Doc’, tells us what to look for in the morning, evening & night skies. In ‘Ian’s Tangent’ he tells us more about Hyabusa 2 on Ryugu and Osiris Rex on Bennu.
In the news:
There can only be one item this week. The astonishing image of the first ever silhouette of a Black Hole at the centre of M87* and how Dr Katie Bouman wrote an algorithm and led a team to crunch the data from 8 Event Horizon telescopes spread all over the planet. The data was contained in 5 petabytes of data which was too large to send over the internet, so was airlifted to her in 500kg of hard drives.
Congratulations to Dr Katie and the 200+ researchers who worked on this project.
The images of both the M87 Black Hole and Dr Katie are guaranteed a place in both history and your children’s and grandchildren’s Science, Astronomy & Physics text books.
For a great explanation of the science of the image watch this short video that can be found at Tinyurl-DOT-Com/explainblackhole
Astrophiz: An Astronomy Podcast 