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Transcript:
INTRO: Chirp of Gravitational Wave – brief Morse Code sound
Brendan: Welcome to the Astrophiz Podcasts. My name is Brendan O’Brien … and first of all, we would like to acknowledge Australia’s first astronomers, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the traditional owners and custodians of the land we are on.
This episode is produced on Yorta Yorta country … and we’d also like you to influence your local politicians to do more to mitigate climate change by moving from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.
We are now in our tenth year of production with over 200 fabulous interviews with top scientists from all over the world.
Each month, we produce two fabulous episodes. On the first of each month, Dr. Ian ‘Astroblog’ Musgrave gives us his Monthly SkyGuide, plus a unique astrophotography challenge. Then, on the 15th of each month, we publish an interview with a leading astronomer, astrophysicist, space scientist, data scientist, telescope engineer, project manager or particle physicist, and we discover their science journey and rare insights into how they think and conduct their amazing research into exactly how our universe works.
Our audio files and transcripts are available on our website at AstrophizDOTcom and our MP3 files can be freely streamed or downloaded to your favourite device from our SoundCloud channel, our free Audible stream, YouTube Podcasts and Apple Podcasts.
And today we’re about to zoom over 16 time zones from rural Australia to Toronto Canada where we are a guest on The York Universe Podcast with Dr Elaina Hyde and Julie Tomé where we are talking about What’s Up in the Skies Down Under.
SFX < brief Morse Code >
Elaina: Hello and welcome to York Universe, the astronomy and astrophysics radio podcast written and presented by the students, faculty, alumni and friends of York University.
You’ll find us now wherever podcasts are distributed. I’ll be one of your hosts this evening.
I’m Dr. Elaina Hyde, and I’m joined tonight by Julie Tomé, and a very special guest, Brendan O ‘Brien, who I will be introducing shortly.
We are broadcasting live from the Allan I Carswell Observatory located at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. York University broadcasts live every Monday night at 9pm local Toronto time or Tuesday morning at 2am UT if that’s more your speed.
The broadcast runs in concert with our online public viewing program run by the amazing Observatory team, and that’s over on YouTube or York Observatory on YouTube. And if you’re joining us live, you can ask them questions in the YouTube chat. To navigate to the live show or find out more, check out our website at york.ca/science/observatory and follow the links, or you can just click on any of the website links that go to YouTube and they’ll all take you to our channel.
If you have any questions or comments about past shows and of course suggestions for future topics, you can always email us at Observe@yorku.ca and you can find us over on Instagram with the handle @yorkuobservatory and Facebook @AllanICarswellObs.
And we’re very excited to be bringing you a new, and I believe never-before-heard on York Universe our guest, Brendan O ‘Brien.
So Brendan O ‘Brien, welcome to York Universe Radio Show. It’s great to have you on and just to give you a little introduction here … Brendan also has a podcast, which everyone should go and check out, it’s Astrophiz. And he does two big episodes every month. He has interviews with leading astrophysicists and experts from around the world.
And he also has a chat with Dr. Ian ‘Astroblog’ Musgrave on the first of every month for his SkyGuide. And that’s at Astrophiz-DOT-com. So Brendan is a fellow astronomy podcaster … It is so great to have you here tonight.
Brendan: Thank you very much Elaina. It’s such a pleasure to catch up with you again and to talk with you from down under land in Victoria Australia to you up to Toronto. Greetings!
Elaina: Yes, absolutely. and I do have to say the last time I think we did a podcast collaboration we were both in Australia and now of course I’m in Canada and you’re in Australia so I hesitate to ask you how is the weather where you are today?
Brendan: Well there’s probably a lot of degrees difference because yesterday our Bureau of Meteorology predicted we’d have 43 degrees centigrade … but it was only 37 yesterday so it was quite a cool day. Lol. It wasn’t the 43 they predicted. I mean while up there in Toronto you’re probably in minus degrees somewhere.
Elaina: Yes we had some snow and it melted and now it’s coming back. So the real key thing is though, how clear are the skies because that’s what really helps you get the telescopes out. And unfortunately, I will have to say for the online public viewing, it looks like we won’t be able to open the Alan I. Carswell Observatory Telescope tonight because we are actually still getting … and let me just check, rain and sleet and ice coming down. So I believe it’s actually coming down as frozen rain. So we can’t open the telescope at the moment.
Brendan: That’s no good. You could send it down to me. We’ve got beautiful clear skies. I’m in a very dark sky area. It’s called Bortle Class 2, which is almost perfect skies, but Yeah, look, I hope the weather clears up for you a bit in Toronto and your people online can get a chance to look up into the heavens with you.
Elaina: Yes, Bortle Class 2 is not something that we can manage, but we do have some partners out in Ontario in the Killarney Provincial Park, which is a similar condition in terms of its dark sky because it’s very, very far from any large cities like Toronto or large football stadium like York University. But yes, getting into dark skies can definitely help. I don’t know if shipping a one meter telescope is really on the cards. But if it was I would consider it yes. Yes, otherwise. Absolutely.
Now we’ve got all kinds of things planned for today. We have a bunch of different sort of Australian fun astronomy history and I thought it would also be quite fun to talk a little bit about some of your own experiences in astronomy and since we usually start off with history in this particular show, why don’t we go and look a little bit of some really fun stuff now?
I think we’ve talked about this before on this show because it’s just super interesting … But ‘This week In Space in Astronomy History’ … Approximately, … so I’m gonna fudge it a little bit and go back to 5 December 2020 the Hyabusa2 re-entry capsule landed in Woomera …
And this is really interesting because it landed in the Woomera test range in Australia. Do you know about that one, Brendan?
Brendan: Yes, and also we pronounce it Woomera. (meaning: ‘Spear-throwing stick’ in Aboriginal language)
Elaina: Oh dear. Despite being Australian and having lived there for 10 years, my pronunciation is still not very good. So thank you very much.
Brendan: It’s an Indigenous name And that test range is basically still on indigenous land in South Australia.
Elaina: And of course, it was a really interesting mission when it came back. I’m probably saying this one wrong too, Hyabusa2 re-entry capsule recovery.
This was a mission by the Japanese Aerospace exploration agency, or JAXA.
And, you know, of course, getting it, you know, getting the gas out of the capsule was, you know, pretty interesting because this was collected from the asteroid Ryugu. And they were hoping to capture some sort of, you know, original, original components, I suppose there.
And I know it has some crossover with one of the items that you mentioned before, of course, you’ll have to help me again. Womera? Woomera,
Brendan: Yes. Woomera.
Elaina: This was a missile range in South Australia in the 1950s as well.
Brendan: Yes, and basically I can fill you in a bit there on that if you like, .. from memory, it was originally a place where the British tested, and the Americans they tested some nuclear devices there in the 1950s and it then it became a ranging station for putting up suborbital missions for NASA and some other countries and it’s got a long history but unfortunately Australia dropped the ball … and we’ll talk about that a bit later, but yes the Woomera range is still being used … last year they tested scramjets from there so it’s got a long history, and being partially in a desert area. It’s a great place to send back any samples from missions and that’s what the Japanese mission did. It sent back its samples and they landed in the desert and they were very happy to collect them because in that sort of country everything that lands there, stands out and it’s easy to find things cause it’s a fairly bland desert.
Elaina: Yeah, and I mean, being able to have a large location that is that kind of sort of flat and semi -uniform makes it not only easy to, of course, find things like capsules that might be landing from interesting agencies. But I know that your tie -in with the 1950s and Australia launching rockets for itself with that missile range in South Australia, there’s an interesting tie -in to me as well because a lot of the old science fiction stories, and I have a penchant for old science fiction stories that were written around that time in the 40s and 50s actually did focus on Australia as a potential launching place for going to the moon, for example. And there was some, I forget who it was, gosh, I’ll have to look up the story later. But, you know, it was actually thought that it might substantially. And unfortunately, it didn’t, but for a while it was an incredibly popular location and I mean it still is a bit.
Brendan: And a lot of our universities send their young PhDs out into the desert because we’ve got a lot of astro and geology-related courses at universities here and finding meteorites in the desert is particularly productive
Elaina: Oh Yeah!
Brendan: … and these PhD students go out to another one of our deserts, it’s their favourite, it’s called the Nullarbor … which literally means no trees, and in the Nullarbor there’s lots of meteorites being found there … all different varieties and there’s some beautiful science research happening just because the desert is a great place to find things.
Elaina: Yeah, and of course Australia being, you know, one of the oldest, you know, sort of accessible pieces of land on Earth, means that you get some really cool stuff out there. … So yeah, anyways, great, great, great Woomera tie-in.
And of course, if folks are interested in the Hyabusa2 re-entry capsule, I don’t now what follow -up mission they’re up to now, but it was a great success.
So the asteroid Ryugu, which has got a few different numbers assigned to it. This was a pretty fun little sample return mission. And we haven’t seen a lot of sample return missions succeed yet, but they are becoming slowly and slowly more popular. So the Hyabusa2 actually did survey the asteroid for about a year and a half and collect samples and burn those samples to earth, which is kind of a crazy idea. And if folks have heard about, you know, the sci-fi version of like asteroid farming and, you know, bringing precious mineral asteroids, you know, back to earth … this was a small, small sample fraction of an asteroid.
EDITORS NOTE: Brendan has just secured an interview with Prof Elizabeth Tasker from JAXA, and they’ll be talking about the mission logistics and subsequent sample analysis of the 5grams of Ryugu dust material that was delivered back by Hayabusa2 to the Woomera range.
Elaina: … And it was a success, but it was also, you know, a fairly expensive mission to do. So you wouldn’t be able to bring back a whole asteroid this way. But it is still really, really fun because of course this is primordial material, presumably from the beginning of the solar system. And you can get into all kinds of fun stuff about solar system begins and all that good stuff as well. Now we’ve got so many fun things we can talk about. Let’s go ahead and look at a couple other fun Australia things from, I think we’ve got at least one more. Julie, you found a great one, which actually is a Honeysuckle Creek, right?
Julie: Yeah, Honeysuckle Creek tracking station. I wasn’t able to find an exact date, but December of 1981 was when that tracking station was closed. The Honeysuckle Creek tracking station was a NASA Earth station near Canberra, Australia, that opened in 1967 and had a 26 -meter dish.
It was instrumental to the Apollo program and received and relayed the first TV footage of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon in July of 1969. Along with the Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex at Tidbinbilla. It had communication and telemetry contact with the Eagle Lander and Columbia command module.
The initial attempt to receive images at Goldstone in California were hampered by operator error and poor scan conversion settings, so they wound up switching to Honeysuckle Creek instead. The Parkes 64m antenna was more powerful, but the angle of its dish was not in line to receive signals during the first seven minutes of the lunar landing. So, Honeysuckle Creek was it. Parkes did receive live pictures later during the lunar landing. Honeysuckle Creek and Tidbinbilla antennas were built and run by NASA, but staffed by Australians as it was a government policy that the director had to be a citizen or a permanent resident and that the staff had to be Australians.
At the end of the Apollo program in ’72, Honeysuckle Creek was redirected to the Skylab program and was used in experiments with scientific stations that were placed on the moon by the Apollo astronauts. In 1974, at the end of the Skylab program, Honeysuckle Creek was connected to the Deep Space Network and given the designation Deep Space Station 44. After the closure of Honeysuckle Creek, the antenna was relocated to Tidbinbilla and became Deep Space Station number 46.
The antenna was decommissioned in late 2009 and declared a historical aerospace site by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and remains at Tidbinbilla in perpetuity.
At the Honeysuckle Creek site, all that remains there today is concrete foundations of the tracking station dish.
Brendan: Yes and there’s a fabulous movie called The Dish and it has Sam Neill … It’s a lovely movie. It tells the story of how those iconic first steps on the moon were captured and transmitted to the world via Honeysuckle Creek and the Parkes Dish … which is the Murriyang Parkes dish. It’s a 64 -meter dish in central New South Wales and the movie, anyone can watch it anytime. It’s free to watch….It’s there on the internet archive and you can catch it at tinyurl DOTcom/thedish2000 … All lowercase, all one word … the dish and then the number 2000.
Elaina: Yeah, it was a great movie. We actually had an event to watch it at the astronomy club when I was still a student at York.
Brendan: Yeah.
Elaina: Yeah. It’s so good. I 100 % recommend this movie to everybody as well. So this is, I think we could give our, you know, official like five star reviews to this movie, but we’re all a little bit biased.
Brendan: Yeah.
Elaina: And of course, you know, the Parkes Dish was, you know, heavily featured in that movie. And I think it was on the cardboard cutout that was in the physics department at Macquarie University when I was doing my PhD. So Great stuff. And of course, Parkes has been involved in so many other things as well. It would be hard to list them all.
And, but do you remember when exactly Honeysuckle, sort of, was fully removed? Was it kind of removed right away at the end of 1974?
Julie: No, it wasn’t until 81 that it was moved.
Brendan: Yep. Now while we’re talking about the Parkes dish, they’re still doing wonderful work there. It’s been continually upgraded and refurbished and the most recent changes that they’ve put in cryogenic ultra-wide bandwidth receivers on it and they’re doing fantastic pulsar work out of Parkes now and the Murriyang dish at Parkes is just doing lovely pulsar timing array work so they’re mapping pulsars in the southern Skies. And in the future, those pulsars will probably become part of a GPS navigation system. But that’s a whole different story.
Elaina: Yeah. And it is, if you are able to make it out to Parkes, New South Wales, Australia, I can first of all, highly recommend it. And second of all, they do actually have a visitor centre as well. And I believe it used to be that you could watch the telescope dish move from the visitor centre. I don’t know if they still kind of have that open access.
Brendan: Yeah. It’s still there. And the staff there are fantastic. They put on regular shows there during the holiday seasons. And they do get a lot of school groups there, and a lot of tourists come through. Those that are brave enough to travel down the Newell Highway from, say, Narrabri down to Canberra. So yeah, it’s a great trip. I did a road trip up there and went to every radio telescope on the east coast … a fantastic time and a lovely part of the country.
Julie: That sounds like a great road trip to go on. Well, I’m adding parks to my list of things. Whenever I make it to Australia, it’s on me.
Elaina: Oh, yeah. You’re going to have a very long list.
Julie: Yeah. Well, I don’t think I can convince my family that going to every radio This is a way to spend a vacation, but I can get one in there.
Elaina: It’s a pretty good one and they do have some fun crossovers with, I would say, you know, some some more, I mean back to science fiction a little bit but they are part of that Breakthrough Listen as well I believe. So they’re, they’re out there searching for radio signals from Extraterrestrial technologies as well.
Brendan: Yes and that sort of works happening in the background 24 /7 they don’t have to point the dish in any … any particular direction to do that Breakthrough Listen work.
Elaina: Excellent yeah so we’ve got all kinds of great stuff to go visit in Australia now … And I thought, you know, maybe we might just take a little break and probably do some news items too. But I thought before we got too far, Brendan, I just thought it would be fun since you haven’t been on the show before. Would you mind telling us a little bit about how you actually got started in astronomy outreach?
Brendan: Oh, look, I’m basically a science nerd. I’ve been involved with science and science education for a long time, and I just wanted to learn about radio astronomy.
I live out here on a rural farm a long way from universities in our capital
cities. I did an online Master’s degree in IT, and I wasn’t entirely happy with the online learning environments at that stage.
I know there are some terrific online learning environments where you could learn radio astronomy. But I thought the best way for me to learn about radio astronomy would be to produce a niche podcast and interview practicing astronomers. And here we are. We’re doing interview number 206 now. I’ve been doing this since 2016, and I’ve loved learning a little bit by osmosis by basically talking with practicing researchers each month. And as much as I’d like to be one myself, I’m not actually a scientist, but I’m in total awe of scientists and the way they think and their generosity and the way they share their ideas with me. Yeah, and I mean, especially my special admirer of astronomers and radio astronomers in particular, wonderful people highly recommended that you get to know astronomers.
Elaina: (laughs) Well, I can only endorse that statement. Julie, what do you think?
Julie: I give astronomers 10 out of 10.
Elaina: Well, I think that’s a great way to highlight one of the things that we always like to talk about on I think this show and other science outreach types of stuff, it’s really wonderful to be able to share the excitement, be able to share some of the discovery, and if you really love any aspect of astronomy or science in general, you’re absolutely in the right place because you’ll always find those other people who are just as enthusiastic about it, and It’s really a wonderful thing to engage with. So I think that comes across really, really well. And of course, you do great work over on your podcast, I have to say.
Brendan: Thank you. But it’s really all down to the generosity of the researchers. They’re just so busy and yet I noticed over the last few years says a lot of awareness on how important outreach is to active researchers they don’t want to get buried totally in their work they’re very happy to share their ideas and their discoveries with the general public because they know that ultimately a lot of the funding comes from taxpayers and they want to give back. So I’ve found astronomers to be a very generous and astute group of people to talk with.
Elaina: Well, I’m certainly glad to have you on this show. On speaking of astronomers and astronomical events. Are there any that really stand out to you? Do you have any real favourite astronomical events from the last two years or so?
Brendan: Well my favourites go back quite a long time and for the mathematically minded someone could probably work out how old I am Because the first astronomical event that I remembered is when Sputnik 1 passed over our house … I was living in Mansfield, Victoria, which is in a couple of hundred miles away from Melbourne, and I was four years old at the time and my brother and I were allowed to stay up late until 7 .30pm to watch this Sputnik go over our house.
And my mother was quite disappointed that the satellite we saw was white, just like a moving star. And it wasn’t red. And because all the newspapers,
a time and a radio, everyone was talking about this red satellite that was going to pass overhead that night. And that’s my earliest memory and yeah so anything that came out of the Soviet Union at that time was called red probably because of a color of their flag at the time. Then after that the next thing I remember is the 1976 total solar eclipse and once again I was out on a farm with a lot of mates and what was really spooky was the way all the birds and animals they went totally quiet and still and it was really spooky and then a bit later in 86 seeing Halley’s Comet when I was camping out in the bush that was awesome to see that famous one and to know that I’d probably be dead when it comes around again … so that’s always astronomy puts you in your place it lets you know just how important you are … but most recently we had a perfect and spectacular view of Comet Lovejoy and that was on Christmas Eve in 2011 and I got the whole family out of bed so here we are at 4 .30am in the morning and there it was!
Comet Lovejoy was just hanging up there in the sky and it took most of the
Western sky and for me it was much more spectacular than Halley’s Comet.
But just recently, Julie and Elaina, just two months ago, we went out and we captured an Aurora. We’ve had a lot of fabulous auroras, the sun going really active at a moment in its 11 year cycle.
And we captured it on camera for the first time, so that was quite inspiring.
And for those who haven’t captured auroras, you’ve got great opportunities up there, way up near the Arctic Circle. There’s a lot of fabulous online groups that anyone can join. And you can learn about capturing auroras and getting some great tips on what sort of camera settings to put on your camera and including how to capture auroras on your smartphone and there’s some fabulous examples all over the interwebs.
So yeah, another great thing to do if you haven’t got a telescope, go out and catch an aurora. This is 24 and 25, the top years in this 11 –year cycle to capture auroras. Get out there. Go on. Get going. Go now.
Elaina: Well, not tonight in Toronto. It’s too cloudy …
Julie, Elaina, Brendan: Laughter
Elaina: But otherwise, yes … absolutely … I definitely recommend it.
I actually saw just a tiny, tiniest bit of Aurora for the first time in my life this year, because as you say, it’s been really, really good. So watch your Aurora watch, and check your Aurora warnings for your local neighborhood. It’s, you’re probably not gonna get a better chance outside of this next year or so.
Brendan: Yep.
Julie: Yeah, I was able to catch some with my kids too. They weren’t spectacular. They zigged when I should have sagged. I went east, should have gone west, but we saw some and they were both so inspired.
And I mean, I’ve always loved catching astronomical things, but now that I can do it with my kids, it’s even that much more awesome!
Elaina: Absolutely. All right, I’m just going to go ahead and remind everyone… Tonight, y ou’re listening to Julie Tomé and our amazing guest, Brendan O ‘Brien, all the way from Australia, and Dr. Alina Hyde.
And we are currently discussing some really great, not just Australian, but
astronomical tips and history. All right, so we’re about to halfway mark and I think we’ve got time for a few more great sort of tips and questions for you, Brendan.I have just a few more, so I think your list of events was incredibly spectacular.
I am actually very impressed with the Comet Lovejoy. I wish I I wish I had
caught that one. But do you do you have any a little bit of a different note?
Do you have any tips for possible students or science communicators in training people who are interested?
Brendan: Oh, yeah, sure. Look, I’ve got an example. And that’s just if you’ve got a SciComm idea … and there’s so many aspects you know not just podcasting this … with the internet now there’s so many opportunities for people to communicate their science in so many different ways and I think the basic thing is just if you’ve got an idea of something that you might enjoy just go ahead and do it … and a second tip is probably always strive to talk with people who are smarter and more experienced than you and it’s not hard … it’s not hard to find people like that, and as I said earlier, you know working scientists are often surprisingly very generous with their time and my Astrophiz podcast could be a good example of those two strategies at work, and it’s an absolute pleasure … and you know finding people is particularly easy because for every interview I do … I asked them to nominate someone else who I might interview at a future date and most people give me two or three names so I’ve got a very long list of people who I can interview for years to come …
and another great thing is that these lovely people … they scream their insatiable thirst for new knowledge they’re just fantastic and I’ve met a few of them in real life but most of them I’ve just met over the interwebs and it’s been a real genuine pleasure to follow their careers and to see them gaining their PhDs, their postdocs, their fellowships and their professorships because I’ve interviewed undergraduates and engineers and people that don’t have positions … and then to watch their trajectory of their careers is just lovely.
And you’re another good example. I’ve been following your career since our first interview, Elaina. And I really thought in that first interview, you talked a lot about Python coding and I thought, “Oh, yes, she’s going to end up being a big coder,” but it turns out you’re still doing that … but now you’re an assistant professor at York University and you’re the resident director of their Alan I Carswell Observatory in Toronto. So it’s been a great pleasure watching yours and everyone else’s stellar careers.
And in your case, Elaina, I won’t be asking what’s next for Doc Hyde because I love surprises. I just keep on watching your career Elaina.
Elaina & Brendan: Laughter
Elaina Yeah, well, I have to admit, some of it surprised me as well. So, you know, it’s it’s not not surprises are not necessarily a bad thing. And absolutely, I agree that it’s, it’s, you know, it’s really wonderful to be able to find out where folks end up. And, how many varied and different sorts of career paths they can, they can go on go on to. And then you, you catch up with them later go, Oh, wow, there you are.
So let’s go ahead and we’ve got least one more question for Brendan here.
So just to keep you on your toes, we’ve got one more for you. And this is maybe the hardest question, but I thought it would be fun to ask you, do you currently have a favorite telescope either large or small?
Brendan: That is a hard question because we really are in the golden age of astronomy in terms of the instrumentation that’s out there in every wavelength.
There’s amazing things now … and most of the interviews I’ve been doing over the last two years, the raves that I get from researchers about the JWST the James Webb Space Telescope …They are just beside themselves!
What it’s producing … the science that’s coming out of them is just astonishing and will be for many years to come … and then we can look forward to the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope and being tested and final construction phases as we speak, and it’s being launched in about two years time and it’s got some beautiful capabilities … we know that James Webb does beautiful infrared and near -infrared work … well the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is going to be a much wider field of view in those infrared and near –infrared wavelengths, which is particularly good for seeing things that are very distant and very long way away in both space and time … and it’s gonna be great to see it come online and then in on terms of earth telescopes we’ve got the extremely large telescope that’s in construction at the moment and it will have first light in about three years time and it’s huge … It’s over near the Atacama Desert in Chile, and it’s got a 40 -meter primary mirror, adaptive optics.
It’s got a camera that weighs four tons, and it will be changing Earth –based optical astronomy for many decades to come, and meanwhile, over here in my little arid patch of land. I’ve got a six inch Newtonian … Yes, I know you’re jealous … Reflector that does quite well for its size.
Mainly because, as I said before, I’m underneath a Bortle Class 2 Sky.
So yes, I’m very lucky. And meanwhile, I’m sure Julie and Elaina that we could do a whole episode on the growing burden of light pollution and how it impacts on optical astronomy because my closest town is 30 kilometers away and I used to be able to just see the glow from the town but in the last two years they’ve built a 24 hour concrete factory to make the concrete lining for the new road tunnels that are being built all underneath the city of
Melbourne. So I’m getting impacted …. my optical astronomy is being impacted by light pollution. So I’m not happy about that factory.
And another thing I’m going to be doing an episode soon about international space law and how ineffective it is because what we’ve got now we’re going to have the potential to have the radio equivalent of pollution happening and impacting on our radio telescopes like the SKA because we’ve got these huge constellations of tens of thousands of Low Earth Orbit satellites being put up by competing companies all over the world and the skies are getting pretty pretty crowded, but those swarms of low Earth orbit satellites also talk to each other and they talk to the ground via radio and our radio telescopes and our spider arrays in the SKA can pick up those transmissions and it produces a sort of fog. So it’s going to be a big challenge for radio astronomers to work out how to see through those swarms of satellites and their radio RFI … their frequency interference … and to see their distant targets.
So, yeah, there’s a lot of great opportunities happening in this golden age of
astronomy and also some incredibly great challenges as well.
Elaina: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s a subject near and dear to all of us in astronomy is the various kinds of light pollution, visible light, radio light. And of course, we’ve seen the pictures of the Hubble Space Telescope got “starlinked”, where they had one of the satellites fly in front of Hubble as it was taking a picture. So even satellites are not immune to being impacted by these sort of low earth orbit swarms. And of course the space junk problem is … not resolved and it’s been pointed out many times of course, but I think we’ll be talking about this one for a while because it’s definitely still a big problem.
Brendan: Yes, work in progress.
Elaina: Absolutely. All right, so let’s go and see if we can hit a couple of fun news items.
I thought, you know, it would be fun to talk a little bit about some of the SKA
and some of the telescopes down there. I know you had some items but there’s a t here was one that came out in the news fairly recently with the SKA-low arrays, and this is, you know, one of the, one of the sort of still under construction, but the SKA-low array has now partnered in from Australia with Germany, India and South Africa now partnering as of December, December 2024.
And you were mentioning that it’s actually quite a bit larger than that now.
Brendan: Yes, it’s fantastic news. The SKA has got a long history.
It’s been a work in progress for decades now, and it’s just coming online as we speak, It’s great to have India, the most recent country to come on board.
And so the full roll call, as we speak, is in alphabetical order because we can’t have favourites. Australia, Canada, China, Germany, India, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, South Africa, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland and the UK … and they’ve all got their hands in their pockets and they’re paying for this great bit of infrastructure to be built in both Australia and down in the Karoo Desert in South Africa where the SKA-mid is happening and here in Australia the SKA-low is based on the Murchison Wide Field Array which has been working for many years now.
It’s basically an array of thousands of spider antennas and you can find them
online. There’s a beautiful design and that data from the tiles of spider antennas …. it’s correlated in a building on site in the desert there in a radio quiet zone … basically they’ve built this huge Faraday cage for the computers and the technicians to live and work in and then they send all of that data down to Perth where it sits on a Cray supercomputer and from there researchers all over the world they download the data they want and do their research that way.
But as we speak yesterday morning as most of Australia slept we had a small CSIRO team that’s our national science body. They were hard at work. You mentioned earlier the Canberra Deep Space Tracking Station at Tinbinbilla near Canberra … and they were talking to the Europa Clipper, which is a fantastic mission, and they’ve just made contact with it. It’s on its way to Jupiter to probe Enceladus I believe … and this Europa clipper that was launched from Cape Canaveral … it’s on its mission and so we’re talking to it from Canberra so there’s some great work happening out in the Murchison Desert and at Tidbinbilla.
It’s a beautiful name. I’ve been there. It’s a wonderful place. Another place with a great education facility there for visitors. So for anyone from Toronto who comes out to Australia, make sure you go to Tidbinbilla and see those huge dishes that work for NASA and JPL and talk to … I think they’re talking to about 40 spacecraft as we speak and any spacecraft that pass into the southern hemisphere plane they have to talk to Canberra.
Elaina: Yeah it’s great stuff … and of course like you say there’s so much going on we’d have trouble to probably … trouble to cover it all. But I think maybe one thing that our listeners might be curious about is that when we’re talking about the Square Kilometer Array or the Murchison Widefield Array, these radio telescopes are really, really different than what you might have imagined a telescope to look like.
And if you haven’t seen a picture of them, definitely look up some pictures online, because If you’ve, if you saw the Parkes telescope dish, or you saw the movie, ‘The Dish’, you have an idea that a radio telescope could look like a big dish or an optical telescope. Most people have an idea what that might look like, but I can guarantee you, you probably haven’t seen the spiders before.
Julie: They look like little trees!
Elaina: They’re, yeah, they do kind of look tree or spider like they’re they’re on these regular little grids, and they’re arranged on a mesh, steel mesh plane, and they’ve got, I think each antenna has 16 dipoles, and that’s on a tile, and then they sort of tile them together.
And so if you, depending on the angle you look at it, it really does, it really does look very, very different, and it highlights, I think, Just the different methods and technology that are needed to process radio light versus optical light, for example. So really, really fun technology.
Brendan: I think the Murchison Widefield Array ones look a bit like spiders because they’ve got these hook legs going all around them. The SKA-low ones that are being installed there, as we speak, are more like metal Christmas trees.
Elaina: Yeah, that’s true. And then the differences in design are really, really
interesting.
Brendan: Oh, and also you’ve got a fabulous one up um in Canada you’ve got CHIME and CHIME is a beautiful thing it’s like a … um … it’s a huge dish that’s been run over by a steamroller and you’ve got this great long outrigger … one it’s just beautiful … CHIME is doing fantastic work
Elaina: Yes! And I think CHIME … we will have to cover it at a different time, but yeah, CHIME is over on the other coast and they are doing great, great stuff as well. Lots of fast radio bursts. I’ll have to check what their most recent breast release was. But yes, absolutely. And I know that they have the, of course the hydrogen mapping experiment is I think the big ongoing one over at CHIME. But yeah, the square kilometer array the Murchison Wide Field Array. The other great thing about about these Australian, you know, hesitate to call them telescopes, large installations of devices that detect light. they stretch on for ages and they cover really wide areas.
So you don’t get a good impression of the true size of the facility without some sort of flyover. And there have been a few flyovers that they have. I don’t know if I can recommend a video, but I know that they’re out there somewhere. Do you have a favorite, Brendan?
Brendan: In terms of films, no … but I’m sure any internet sleuth could find them quite easily. Another thing that’s out there in the desert near the SKA low construction that’s happening at the moment is an older one called ASKAP.
Elaina: Yes, ASKAP! Yes!!
Brendan: ASKAP’s a beautiful array of radio telescopes, a more traditional type of dish telescope, but that array is so sensitive it could pick up a mobile phone (signal) on Pluto. It’s so sensitive … it’s fantastic, and I don’t know whether it’ll be working with the SKA-mid that’s being constructed out in the Karoo Desert in South Africa but it’s a similar design that’s an array of a dozen or so I think beautiful radio telescopes and yes there will be some flyover videos but I haven’t got one to give you right now I’m sorry.
Elaina: Oh that’s OK … I’m I we will set it as an extra challenge for our our listening audience to go and find it. I believe in all of you.
All right, well, I think we were just about running towards the end of out of time here. We have a few extra notes about, of course, that SKA-Low and the Murchison Widefield Array you had mentioned when we were chatting before.
Of course, the problem with the satellite pollution and that these sites are designed to be radio quiet zones. So these are all facilities.
Well, maybe not all of them, but most of them will be under impact of these low earth orbiting satellites, right?
Oh, absolutely, yes, and I know that one of our arrays, ASKAP, has been coordinating with a particular constellation of satellites, and they’re trying to work out a way that when they point their telescopes in the ASKAP array at a particular part of the sky, they’re hoping that the Low Earth Orbit Satellite constellation can turn itself off temporarily or point the other way.
There is some cooperation happening between low Earth orbit constellation people and the radio telescopes and hopefully they’ll be able to work out a way of cooperating and clearing the air for that important research to be done.
Elaina: I think ‘clearing the air’ is a wonderful way to put it. Unfortunately, we are just a bit we’re all we’re actually out of time. So I do have to say thanks to everyone for joining us for this amazing episode of York Universe. The astronomy and physics radio podcast written and presented by students, faculty, alumni and friends of York University. The hosts this evening have been Julie Tome and myself, Dr. Elaina Hyde, and of course, we have had Brendan O ‘Brien from Astrophiz on as our special guest this evening.
If you’d like to find out more about the Astrophiz podcast that we’ve been talking about in this very episode, it’s on Astrophiz-DOT-Com and you’ll find much more of his wonderful work over there. Thank you everyone for joining us this evening. You can always connect with us on Instagram @yorkuobservatory and Facebook @AllanICarswellObs.
Check out our website for show notes, content updates, and of course that ongoing fundraiser over at yorku-DOT-ca /science /observatory. Thanks for tuning in to York Universe, ‘Clear Skies!’ and have a good night.
Julie: Good night.
Brendan: Good night. Thank you.
Brendan: Remember, Astrophiz is free, no ads, and unsponsored. But we always recommend that you check out Dr Ian Musgrave’s AstroBlogger website to find out what’s up in the night sky.
So we’ll see you in two weeks when we bring you an in-depth interview with a brilliant young astrophysicist from Oxford who has made amazing discovery of a new and unique class of ancient galaxy found in the primordial universe using the JWST … you’ll love Dr Alex Cameron. See you then. Keep looking up!
MUSIC: Radio Waves
The Astronomy Astrophiz Podcasts 