Astrophiz 220: Dr Emil Lenc ~ Imaging Radio Skies

Listen: https://soundcloud.com/astrophiz/astrophiz220-dr-emil-lenc-imaging-radio-skies

Transcript:
SFX: Pulsar/Gravitational Wave Chirp

Brendan: Welcome listeners … to episode 220 of Astrophiz.

Today we’re bringing you a fabulous interview with an amazing astrophysicist, Dr. Emil Lenc, who works on commissioning new capabilities on telescope arrays like the ATCA, the MWA, ASKAP, and the beautiful new SKA-Low Array over in the harsh scrublands in outback Western Australia, which is part of the multi-billion dollar Square Kilometer Array

He has some great stories and insights into this golden age of radio astronomy. So let’s zoom up to Sydney to speak with Emil. Enjoy!

SFX: Morse Code snippet

Brendan:  
Hello, Emil.

Emil:
Hi, Brendan.

Brendan:
Today, listeners, I’m really excited … We’re lucky enough to be speaking with Dr Emil Lenc, who is a senior research scientist at the CSIRO, Australia’s premier science research organisation.

Emil has overseen the commissioning of a diverse range of radio telescope arrays, and my guess is he’s pretty excited about Australia’s contribution to the immense Square Kilometer Array project, which he has contributed to in no small way.

Now, first up, thanks for speaking with us today, Emil.

Emil:
Oh, it’s a pleasure. Actually, I’ll just add that I’m almost just as excited with the Pathfinders for the SKA, because they’re kind of a bit like Deep Thought in Douglas Adam;s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. You know, it may be the second –greatest telescopes of all time, whereas SKA will be the greatest. But not to play down, you know, how amazing SKA will be, but the Pathfinders actually really do push some new technologies and kind of testing different parameter spaces that weren’t tested before. So even though, you know, getting SKA running, there’ll be still a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to scale it up to SKA-low and SKA-mid, for example, to make them operational. But to some degree, yeah, there’s still just sort of larger versions of the more capable telescopes we have today.

What I find really exciting is with the Pathfinders, you know, pushing new frontiers in terms of how telescopes work.

Brendan:
Thank you. That’s great.
Look, I’m going to take us back a little bit. Before we get into the nitty-gritty of your commissioning work and the other astrophysics research that you can do, let’s travel right back in time….

And can you tell us where you grew up, please, Emil? Could you tell us how you first became interested in science and space?

Emil:
Sure. I’m not sure if we should have violins in the background as I’m speaking about this. So I grew up in the western suburbs of Melbourne, actually. And my brothers actually built their own observatory when I was a young boy. They were actually much older than me, 12 and 16 years older than I was.

So even when I was still a toddler, their rooms were full of posters from the lunar missions, which were, you know, still fresh off the news. So I think I always had an interest in astronomy that stemmed from that exposure.

Another big influence was Carl Sagan’s ‘Cosmos’ when I was in my teens, I think. And I found that program to be just incredibly inspiring and thought-provoking.

I also grew up in the kind of period of Star Wars, you know, 1977. I went to the first showing of that in Australia. I guess I got the tail end of the original Star Trek era, though I relived it again when Star Trek New Generation came on TV.

These also kind of expanded my thoughts of what might be out there. My dad was an electrician and my brothers went into electronics and computers, so at home we had our own homemade dark room for processing photographs. We had our own … and making circuit boards. We had a room next door to the garage, which we called the lab.

That’s where my brothers built things and where I was allowed to experiment with electricity and operational health and safety would have an absolute fit if they saw the things that I was getting up to in there.

So when I was in high school, I had the mirror that my brothers originally used with their telescope and I had that resurfaced with the help of my dad and he built a motorized mount and tube for that. I mean it was just in time for the arrival of Halley’s Comet which unfortunately turned out to be much less impressive than what the media had built up in expectation … but at the time, yeah really astronomy was more just a hobby as opposed to you know me thinking of it as a career.

Brendan:
Fantastic. It sounds like a really interesting start with your family.
Now, let’s think about how your ambitions may have changed and developed? What early ambitions did you develop and did they change much over time?

Emil:
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So strangely enough, at the time, I never really considered astronomy as a career. I was totally unaware of you know the amazing science that was being done here in Australia. So I kind of just followed the footsteps of my brothers and pursued a career in electronic engineering and I specialised in software engineering but later also did a research Master’s (degree) looking at digital image compression.

It was only about a decade into my career I found out about an online astronomy course being held at Swinburne University in Melbourne and I thought I’d give that a go on a part -time basis and I absolutely loved it and learned that there was a thriving astronomical community in Australia in my home  town on my very own doorstep.

But when I finished that I was absolutely gutted because it was like someone suddenly turned off the fire hose of excitement, exploration, and learning … that experience during that course, and I was left wanting.

It was actually at that point that I revisited my career decisions and quit my job and went back to do a research PhD in astronomy.

Brendan:
Wow! Thanks, Emil. Look, I’m going to list a couple of those things.
Swinburne has got an awesome reputation for their astrophysics and their visual imagery work using their supercomputers.
But you’ve got degrees in engineering, in science, in electrical and electronic engineering. You were awarded your Astrophysics PhD for your research into Starburst Galaxies using Australian radio telescopes and using VLBI, Very Long Baseline Interferometry.

Now, you developed and demonstrated new imaging techniques for the first time, and after that, you were snapped up by Australia’s premier science organisation, the CSIRO, and you did a postdoc with the beautiful ATCA Array, the Australian Telescope Compact Array which it really isn’t that compact.

I saw it when I went up to Narrabri in Northern New South Wales to interview Jamie …, Dr. Jamie Stevens ( Astrophiz Ep 70) who you’ve probably worked with a few years ago.

Now the ATCA is a stunning series of six 22-metre dishes, which can be strategically rolled into an infinite combination of positions along a dedicated three -kilometre -long railway track to use interferometry to probe the secrets of our universe. It was first commissioned about 40 years ago,

… and it’s still doing great research for us. I found over 700 papers in just one database. The most recent being the 11th of May 2025, and there’s probably some in the pipeline, as we speak.

Are you still in love with the ATCA, Emil?

Emil:
Oh Oh, absolutely. Yes, … it can be not so compact, but it can also be compact Relatively speaking so you can, as you mentioned, you know, there’s that railway track and you can actually push those telescopes right next to each other … Depending on what kind of science you’re actually trying to accommodate for you know.

it’s a great little telescope because it’s super efficient You know, like there are many bigger telescopes around the world, like the VLA has, what is it, 26 antennas and they’re 25-meter ones.

But what the Compact Array does is just amazing with those six antennas, because you can move them around, it can kind of make it look like a much bigger telescope than what it is, because you can position those telescopes in different locations to… you know, achieve different types of science and combine that data together.

And also, it’s actually a perfect east -west array. And I won’t go into the math of explaining why this is really important, but it actually makes the processing of the data to make images much, much simpler.

So it’s all these kind of clever innovations that were put into it that allow you to do things much more efficiently and with minimal costs. I think the other thing, you mentioned that there’s a recent paper, the papers have been basically ongoing ever since Compact Array became available and it’s because it’s continuously being upgraded with new technology and that allows it to, you know, basically push what you can do with the same hardware … same dish by adding … you know, better receivers by adding better back ends you can actually do more and more innovative science with it.

So when I first started with the Compact Array, I was involved in commissioning of what they call the broadband correlator. We call it, we just call it CABB, C -A -B -B. And this allowed it to listen to a much wider range of radio frequencies all simultaneously, which again enhance the kind of science you could do with it, but also gave it really good sensitivity, so you could probe deep … deeper into the universe.

You know, after a decade of operation, even that’s now starting to get a bit long in the tooth and they’re struggling to find spare parts for it because much of the GPUs … So the kind of hardware that’s used for gaming is now being used to make the compact array even better.

I think the other reason why it’s become really popular recently is while we have fantastic instruments like ASKAP and MeerKAT, when we find something with those instruments, we need to follow it up using that sort of wide field … it’s … that we can get with the compact array because observing with the Compact Array allows you to go all, you know, across a wide range of frequencies and that kind of gives you extra clues as to what you’re seeing.

It’s kind of like a crime scene in investigation, and you’re just trying to grab all these extra clues you can to try and understand what you’ve just seen. And so the Compact Array has kind of had a second life now, particularly for ‘Transient’ follow ups. It’s really making that exciting, in terms of science.

Brendan:
Fantastic! Science never sleeps … and I love your description of detecting crime scenes. You’re very much a detective yourself … the way you search the universe for information.

Now let’s move on …  and you did indeed move on, even though you’re still in love with the ATCA, you then moved over to the Pathfinder, the ASKAP Array, based in the remote outback West Australian desert scrublands. It’s beautiful out there, and you were there as the leader of the Imaging Working Group, and then you worked with another array in the Outback, the famous Murchison Widefield Array … and right now you’re helping to commission the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder, ASKAP, to pave the way for the SKA.

Can you tell us a bit about what’s happening with the construction and early science that’s coming out of the SKA-low array out in the desert please and one last thing … do you get out there much?

Emil:  
I can answer that last one  … probably not as much as I’d like …  I’ve been on site twice so I was out there when I was doing the MWA commissioning, and I’ve bwwn out there  recently for a radio school excursion … basically to take a bunch of the students that were participating and also the lecturers. We all went out on site and it’s fantastic out there. I really love it. It’s desolate but beautiful in its own way.

So yeah, every chance I can get out there, it’s a great opportunity to do so.

Brendan:
Cool. I’m a bit envious there. I was over in Perth on the weekend … But it’s so remote out there. I didn’t get a chance and one day I hope to get out there But I think that could be a long way off.

Now We’ve set the scene What the plan for today is to dive a bit deeper into some of your actual work first up then we’ll jump right in What does it mean to commission an instrument like ASKAP and the MWA, what does that work involve for you in your personal expertise area?

Emil:
Commissioning a telescope is quite an involved process. So it usually involves a fairly core team of individuals that are very experienced in various aspects of the telescope. So it’s very rare that anyone will know absolutely everything there is to know about the telescope, but everyone will have their own little niche area, and those niche areas will hopefully overlap with other people that are involved in the team.

So as part of commissioning, what it generally involves is running a series of test observations to make sure that basically the telescope is doing what you’re expected to do. And some of these things can be quite subtle.

And early on in the process, it can be really tricky because you’re not sure. Sometimes you’re dealing with a lot of new software, a lot of new hardware, and it can be really tricky trying to work at it. Okay, is this a software problem? Is it a hardware problem or is it both? Is it, you know, or even the tools that you’re using sometimes have problems. So it’s quite challenging and you often have to find solutions to problems on the fly.

And particularly, for example, if there does happen to be a hardware issue or some limitation in the hardware, you then have to possibly find software solutions to overcome that.

Generally I guess you start off by just starting simple, you point the telescope at a bright compact source and you just make sure, okay, can we actually see that compact source? Then you take it a step deeper and you start looking at other sources in the field. Can we see a wide field of sources? Do those sources have the right brightness, you know, compared to, you know, for a given frequency, do we see the right brightness? If it’s a spectral line observation, do those spectral lines occur in the right location, particularly for a frequency, because that tells you that you’ve calibrated that aspect of it correctly.

I remember one case also where we took an image using the telescope and it was flipped. So the sources were actually basically left to right. They were wrong. And It was like, “What on earth is going on there?” And after looking into things, realized there was a problem with the firmware in a recent update and that had introduced a bug.

So it’s a really weird things like that can happen. Other things that you look at a timing, for example, this is particularly important for like pulsar observations. You wanna check that, okay, when the pulse are pulses, does it actually, are we recording the correct time for that pulse.

Also things like polarization which is basically the orientation of the light you need to make sure okay do we have the right sign for that because polarization can be either positive or negative and we need to make sure that that’s all correct.

Yeah so it’s a lot of basically just checking things like that.

Brendan:
Wow!  It sounds like an amazing process … and look, the days of there being some lone genius doing all the work are well and truly over, and it sounds like you’ve got a large commissioning team to work with.

Would you like to tell us about that commissioning team that you’re working with, Emil?

Emil:
So, as I mentioned previously, the team’s built up with individuals who specialise in various aspects of science or various aspects of the telescope … we’;; have some who are very experienced in how to schedule  …and how to operate the telescope … others who are perhaps familiar with the hardware that goes on the telescope … others with a particular science interest who  are very knowledgeable with spectral line work, for example, others which are very experienced in polarization work, others that are experienced in pulsar timing work.

So having all those different experiences is really important to test all those various aspects of the telescope. And we’d usually go through what we call like “busy weeks” …  where everyone gets together. We’ll have some observations that we need to look at and we’ll just check that through and through to make sure those observations actually make sense and the telescope’s doing what we expect it to do.

And it’s really fun to do! They’re very intense but it’s a great team environment when you’re sort of deep into that kind of work.

Brendan:
Okay … and the team is driven by a huge amount of expertise and curiosity and coffee?

Emil: Yeah … especially coffee.

Brendan:
Very good. Look, we know that there’s a lot of early career astronomers and potential PhDs that listen to these episodes. And we like to give a bit of information about what it’s like to be a scientist and an astrophysicist in particular and what does a typical week look like for you when you’re out in the middle of that commissioning phase of a project? I know there’s probably not such a thing as a typical week but can you tell us about a week’s work?

Emil:
Yeah so it’ll depend on you know, when that week is. So, you know, as I mentioned, there’s like ‘busy weeks’ where it can be very intense period where everyone’s working together very closely in the same room, trying to understand issues of, you know, that have been seen in the telescope. But I think, you know, more typically, you’ll have a week where you’re not in the same room, you’ll be, you know, in your organization or working from home, wherever it may be. And you’ll be connecting up via Zoom, or we often use Teams, or whatever system we use.to connect together, we’ll have also various ways of chatting together using like Slack or Mattermost and discussing basically observations that we’ve had, or suggesting new observations to try to diagnose a particular problem that we know exists.

You basically try to find ways that you can make an observation as simple as possible to highlight a problem so that you can exactly work out where that problem is occurring. And then find a way to try and alleviate that problem, you know, like whether it’s due to software or hardware or a limitation of the system as it currently stands.

Yeah, it’s basically that. I mean, if we’re lucky, sometimes we actually find new things as we’re observing for commissioning. And that can be pretty exciting as well. That kind of throws a bit of a curveball and everyone starts, you know, investigating that, particularly when you’re not sure … okay, is this just something weird that just happened with the telescope or is it something real?

So there can be a lot of excitement as we try to investigate that.

Brendan:  That sounds exhausting to me, and thank you.  

Emil: That’s where the coffee comes into it.

Brendan:
Now, the big thing that’s happening over there in the West is of course, the development of the SKA-Low, the Australian component of the world’s biggest astronomical observatory, the multi -billion dollar SKA arrays being built here in Australia and the sister arrays being built over in South Africa.

Can you tell us about the main focus of your current SKA work?

Emil:
My main focus is really learning as much as we can with the Pathfinders so that that can be applied to the new telescopes that are being built.

So in the case of ASKAP, how do we deal with multiple beams, which allows us to see a wider field of the sky, and also work with the MWA. How does the ionosphere, for example, affect our observations? Because the SKA-low will encounter exactly the same issues or challenges I should say. It’s trying to get an understanding of what it’s like to observe with a smaller scale instrument first before diving into the a big production industrial scale type of version of that instrument and hopefully trying to overcome some of the challenges before we dive into that just to make the problem a bit easier.

Brendan:
Thanks, Emil. Now we know very well that science doesn’t always run smoothly … as you’ve just indicated … and we’re very happy to put our propeller heads on for a very short time. Could you tell us some of the details of a particular part of your research that you’re working on right now that’s driving you crazy or is astonishingly exciting? Or perhaps it’s even both?

Emil:
Well, one of the crazy bits, driving me crazy … was because ASKAP has 36 beams, we had to take certain shortcuts in the way that we calibrate the instrument. And as a result, one of the problems was that sources kind of jiggle between the different beams.

So we couldn’t very accurately pinpoint where they were in the sky. They’d always be slightly off from where we expected them to be. And that was conflated even more once you start combining the beams together to create an image because in one beam, it’ll be seeing it as slightly to the left and the neighbouring beam, it’ll be seen as slightly to the right, and then you combine them and they kind of get slightly blurred.

For the most part, that’s not a huge problem, but it is a problem if, for example, you see something go off and you’re trying to work out, okay, where was that? And then you’re trying to identify an optical counterpart to that, you know, again, going back to the crime scene investigation to try and understand, “Okay, what is this thing?”

It gets tricky because then you may have several optical sources in that region of where that blur is. And you’re not then sure, okay, is it the one that’s closer to the left or the one that’s closer to the right? You kind of lose that information. There’s something that’s been keeping us busy for the past … gosh … I’d say a year now is trying to work out a way in which we can actually correct for that in the first place before we start combining all the together.

We have a post doc in Western Australia that’s actually been doing some great work in basically comparing each one of those beams with surveys done at other wavelengths which are very precise and then using that as a kind of guide of how to correct each one of those beams before we combine them into what we call a mosaic image and that’s getting really close to being completed now.

So I think that’ll be a game changer in terms of then doing these cross matching with other wavelengths, so optical and infrared and x -ray and so on. So it’ll be really fantastic to get that finished. In terms of things that I find really fascinating, recently I guess these Long Period Transients have become quite a thing.

Quite a few have been discovered now with ASKAP. So they’re originally discovered with the Murchison Widefield Array, but now more and more we’re seeing them with ASKAP as well.

And they’re still a bit of an enigma. We’re trying to understand exactly what they are. They don’t seem to be just simple pulsars, because they pulse like every six hours for some of them. And that’s just way too long to be explained by a simple pulsar.

So they’re trying to understand, “Okay, where does that energy come from to create those pulses?”

And why are they so regular? It’s something that’s been, there’s been quite a bit of intensive research in that area recently.

Brendan:
Fantastic! Now, let’s look at some of the more personal sides. We’ll take a little break from science. We’re going to get back to it very soon. I had a look at some of your published papers and I found well over 130 of them on the ArXiv server alone, and I noticed that you wrote quite a large number of them when the COVID pandemic was at its peak back in 2020 -2021.

Now, how did COVID affect you and your family And what was the impact on your research? Were there lessons learnt?

Emil:
That’s a great question actually. It’s a complex question too. I know for a lot of people it was a very difficult period. Social isolation, you know, being separated from family, friends, it can be really difficult.

I’d have to admit I’m a pretty introverted person by nature. So it had almost little effects on me whatsoever. And I don’t have family here in Sydney, all my family’s back in Melbourne. So apart from, you know, not being able to visit them in Melbourne, which we’d probably only do once a year anyway, just during Christmas breaks. It didn’t have a huge effect in terms of me personally. So I was in my natural environment, so to speak because, you know, just naturally introverted. I mean, it allowed me to have less distractions from, you know, work, you know, meetings and less time in, you know, pollution-generating commutes into the office and back.

It also gave me more time to pursue hobbies and spend time with family, which, you know, to some degree, I’d neglected over the years as well, just ’cause I didn’t have the time. And the lockdowns did a great job for improving progress in othe communication methods, you know, like video conferencing, team chat-type tools, various other team tools.

So it was really great from that aspect and it gave me lots of time to actually do work on science and a wide variety of science.

The downside, of course, was that every day of feeling a bit like Groundhog Day and I tend to like this like monotony so that kind of drove me stir crazy after a while you know… despite not having to meet people just you know going through the same routine every day just kind of drove me crazy.

The other downside is you fall into the trap of not being able to separate work from home life so ironically there were times where you know, we’re all in our own rooms doing our work and study and didn’t interact as much as we thought we should have, even though we’re under the same roof.

At the same time, because my son was going through high school at the time, I really felt for those children that were in high school or those going through university or starting a new job, because that’s the time where you really start to build up lifelong relationships with friends. And that’s really hard to do if you can’t interact.

You can do it to a certain degree online, but it’s not the same.

And I also felt for those that were in the service and entertainment industry, you know, they were really hit hard. So, you know, there’s a lot of downsides.

There are some positive sides. I think the other downside was I felt like it was kind of the start of lots of ridiculous conspiracy theories and, shocking to me, at least, distrust of science. And I think that effect is still continuing to this day.

You know, vaccination numbers are down and a lot of preventable diseases are coming back. You know, diseases we thought we got rid of.

Yeah, so that’s a real shock to me. I mean, I still mostly work from home and I still quite enjoy it. I’m certainly much but I’m a bit more careful now with regards to separating home from work and we’ve got two dogs and they often help in reminding me that it’s time to log off at the end of the day.

Brendan:
Yeah the growth of the anti -vax industry has been a huge disappointment for me personally and also there appears to be some international attacks on science itself … but look let’s move on and get back to the science.

Could you tell us how you’ve been using the ASKAP array to find some interesting radio sources you hinted at earlier?

You’ve recently written them up as research papers and those long period radio transits that you’ve discovered?

Emil:
Sure. Well, I’ll preface that by saying that I didn’t discover the first one. I’ve discovered quite a few of them, but they were originally discovered by Natasha Hurley-Walker (Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker Ep 61) with the MWA. She probably … even earlier than that, I think there was one discovered with the VLA. Gosh … must be like 20 years ago.

ASKAP is a really fantastic instrument just because it, as I mentioned previously, is exploring a different phase space than what was explored previously. Firstly, we’ve got a wide field of view.

We’ve got really good resolution and pretty good sensitivity. So it’s allowing us to see fairly large areas of the sky in one chunk and being able to look at that in great detail. And because I was working as part of the commissioning team, constantly looking at images that come through, particularly looking for what we call imaging artefacts.

So when you see a point-like source, you expect that to be point-like. You don’t want it to have star-like flares or some weird, positive and negative undulations emanating from that source, because that’s usually a hint that something’s gone wrong with either the telescope or the processing of the data.

But sometimes, once you get used to looking at these artefacts, sometimes you can recognize a certain pattern in these artefacts, which suggests it’s not actually a problem with the instrument, but rather that the source varied while we’re observing it.

For example, it flashed or suddenly decreased in brightness or suddenly increased. And that prompts me then to say “Okay, this is interesting, let’s have a closer look at it.”

And that’s how I found a few interesting sources. The other way is using something that is called polarization, which is the actual orientation of light.

And there’s one particular type of polarization called circular polarization, which astronomically speaking is not as common. And you don’t… basically only a few select types of sources will emit circular polarization. And yet it’s something that’s very easy to image, because there’s hardly anything in the sky like that emits this emission.

So you basically end up with lots of blank images. In the past, people never bothered to do that for that reason, or why should I image in circular polarization all I’m going to get is a blank image?

But from my point of view, I thought … “Well, actually, that’s a really fantastic way to find something that changes in the sky”  …  something interesting that changes, because if you see it in circular polarization, it immediately captures your focus that … “Okay, this is something interesting to look at.”

So we found the first pulsar with ASKAP by actually just looking at circular polarization.

We weren’t even looking for pulsars, we were observing a flare star and we saw another source kind of further out in the field and we thought, “Oh, what’s that?” And eventually found out that it just happened to be a pulsar that all of the pulsar surveys today just happened to miss for whatever reason.

And we’ve been using that technique for finding long period transients because they’ll often leave a signature in circular polarization. We found heaps and heaps of radio stars, which Laura (Dr Laura Driessen – Ep 169)  I think she was on the show previously, she would have talked about. They can be used to find pulsars, magnetars.

And who knows … probably some sources that we don’t even know what they are. So it’s a really easy way to find such sources.

The other thing that I’ve been using is chopping up the data into smaller time scales. So pulsars generally occur very quickly on one second time scale. So usually milliseconds to seconds. But ASKAP images in 10 second chunks. So anywhere between 10 seconds and 10 hours.

So that gives you a time scale that’s not typically probed. And it just so happens that these long period transients do kind of occur on those long time scales. So they’re often missed by telescopes that observe for a shorter period of time, and also missed by those that are only looking at very short time scales because their pulses are too wide that they’ll just miss them.

So it’s actually been great having ASKAP… it has been really beneficial for finding these kinds of sources.

Brendan: It Sounds like a beautiful instrument. Thank you. Okay. You’ve painted the big picture of imaging and commissioning radio telescopes arrays. We’ve just heard about the excitement of discovery, finding things in your data that has been overlooked.

We’ve looked at your most current work. We’ve gone all sciencey for just a little while. Would you like to tell us about some of those other things outside of your astro passion that regularly bring you great joy? Now, I believe you have a very musical family.

Emil: My son, for sure, he’s really into music. I tried to get him excited by science. He loves science, but yeah, that wasn’t his forte. He loves music and I love music.

Arin loves music, but he’s the first one to really take it on as a career. So, yeah, I’m really proud that he’s taken it on in more ways than one because, you know, if he did science and it’s like, oh, you know, it would seem like I did everything to help him to get into that. But basically him doing music, I have zero music skills when it comes to playing an instrument.

So that’s all his own work. Everything he’s achieved has been his achievement, and that makes me even more proud. So that’s fantastic.

Brendan: Fantastic. Now, I may edit this out. You’ll probably appreciate my story. my two daughters. I would have loved them both to become astrophysicists … but one of them is a filmmaker for the Children’s Hospital in Melbourne and the other one’s the Music Librarian for the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. Both of them appreciate science   ,,, but both of them are very artistic their output.

Emil: That’s fantastic, using both sides of the brain. I mean, that’s … you couldn’t ask for more. I mean, I don’t expect everyone to, you know, to want to do science or, you know, engineering as a career, but I think having an understanding of it …

Brendan: Yes.

Emil: And appreciation of it is, you know, really important, even if you pursue other career avenues, you know, it’s just having that understanding is so so important.

Brendan: Indeed. Now we’ve done all the big picture stuff, we’ve done the specific science, we’ve really dived into it, but now the microphone is all yours and you’ve got the opportunity to give us your favorite rant or rave about one of the challenges that we face in science, in equity, in representations of diversity or in science denialism. One of my favorite, or science career paths, or perhaps your own passion for research or our huge human quest for new knowledge.

The microphones all yours, Emil.

Emil: My gosh, how many hours have you got?

I have to be a bit careful with what I say as well, because I have to preface this by saying that anything I say from now on will be my own personal opinion and not necessarily anything to do with the organisation I work with, so I just have to be a bit careful with that.

I absolutely agree that diversity is important and supporting diversity in organisations, you know, just apart from plain old human decency, I mean, it provides other benefits. I mean, having people with different backgrounds, different, you know, cultural perspectives, different language perspectives, but it affects your brain and how you think and provides different viewpoints that you wouldn’t otherwise get if everyone thinks the same way, we’re not going to move forward. We’re always just going to be reinventing the wheel and doing the same things.

In fact, it just sort of brings to mind a Chinese proverb, (speaks in

foreign language ‘Bù pà màn, jiù pà tíng’) which is basically saying, “Don’t be afraid of going slowly, be afraid of standing still.”

It’s basically …  if you’re not making progress, moving forward. You’re effectively going backwards.

So I think having all these different cultural experiences and religious experiences, even though I’m not particularly religious myself, but there’s no doubt that that has an effect on how people perceive the world.

Having those different perceptions and experiences all add value. And we need to embrace that, not ignore it, or even downplay it. So yeah, so I’m always really, all for having a greater diversity in the organization.

In terms of science denialism …  yeah, it’s frightening, and it’s a huge danger for us all. I mean, admittedly, science doesn’t always get it right the first time, but that’s where people misunderstand what science is about.

Science is a process.

And sure, we may not get it right the first place, but science is self–correcting and self -improving. So you’ll have some other scientists will try to repeat the work that has been published and say, “Hold on, there’s something wrong here.” And that’s how it becomes self-correcting. They’ll provide evidence to say, “No, it’s not actually this is What you thought was happening, this …  is what is actually happening.”

So when we talk about giving equal weight to the same points of view, one has to be careful that even if it has been published, it hasn’t only just been published and hasn’t really had a chance to be tested by other people. Because if you give that a lot of weight, even though it’s contrary to everything that we know to date … Then there’s a danger that people think, “Oh, okay, maybe there’s something in that.”

Carl Sagan had a great quote, basically, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” That is so true. We really need to be careful about promoting things as being science when they’re not. I think there’s also a danger, particularly that, you know, they might argue: “Oh, nothing really comes out from pure science, you know, like astronomy.”

And it’s, it’s actually not true. You know, astronomy has pushed a lot of technologies, particularly in optics and electronics. And it’s through the cross-fertilization of that that, you know, we’ve got things like Wi -Fi, we’ve got CCD cameras, you know, everyone now has a phone with a camera in it. Everyone has a phone with a GPS in it. You know, if that astronomy GPS wouldn’t work. You know we’ve got things like solar panels, MRI scanners, they all have you know tentacles that reach back to you know astronomy, research in astronomy.

I think also you know astronomy is a great way to put things into perspective. You know we’re not at the centre of the universe and the universe doesn’t revolve around us.

You know images like the ‘Pale Blue Dot’ taken with Voyager 1 … and it just demonstrated how small our Earth is even on the scale of the solar system, let alone the galaxy or the universe.

And it also shows us how precious life is. You know, all of the people that we know, everyone that existed, everyone that we ever knew was on that one little dot, that one little blue dot and it highlights how important it is for us to take care of our planet and for other life living on it.

I personally feel astronomy gives a sense of humility. It’s very humbling. I reckon if more people studied it and understood astronomy, perhaps there’d be less hate in the world and maybe less wars.

Perhaps I’ll be a bit idealistic, a bit romantic with regards to astronomy, but to some degree I think that would be the case.

And I think, you know, I guess the media also has a role here in having a better understanding of science. I mean, a lot of the science reporters that used to exist no longer do that. You know, they’re not paid to understand science. It’s really, it’s always about creating controversy. And I think that creates an image in the public that science is perhaps doing the wrong thing and then science is already funded at quite low levels, … at least in Australia and you know we’ll just fall behind if that continues, but it needs public engagement otherwise it’s not going to go anywhere.

Brendan: Exactly and that ‘pale blue dot’ … it’s incredibly …  both dignifying and humbling. And ahhh … yeah … you’ve reminded me that science doesn’t sleep … and I’ve got an interview coming up soon … and we’re going to be talking about how Andromeda and the Milky Way … aah, we’ve thought for the last twenty years that they’re going to bash into each other … but it seems the data is now saying we’ll just miss each other

Emil: Heh!

Brendan: … I was planning on hanging around for another 5 billion years …

Emil: Hahahah!

Brendan: …. but I think I’ll miss it too.

Emil: That’s exactly it!  It goes back to what I was saying …  that we may not always be right, but we self-correct. If we find evidence that is to the contrary of what we thought was true, we have to change our minds. We have to go … You know, the evidence is saying we can’t just keep holding on to what was if evidence shows it’s something else.

Brendan: Exactly! Science is never dogmatic. Okay. Thanks, Emil. Is there anything else we should watch out for in the near future? What are you keeping your eye on?

Emil: Well, you know, the actual SKA progress is something that’s fascinating to keep an eye on. I guess particularly I’m paying attention to what’s happening with SKA-Low … even though I’m not directly involved with it. It’s kind of close to my heart because it’s an extension of what the MWA did.

If you’re interested, I can just mention briefly that they’ve now built the first test stations of SKA-Low. So they’ve got four stations and each one of these has 256 of these so-called ‘Christmas tree antennas,’ they basically look like little Christmas trees, which gives it that broad range of frequencies that it can observe at.

And there’s a recent press release with one of the first images from that, which is really amazing given that it’s only been installed …  to already have images is quite a major effort.

And from what I understand, they’ve now got 21 stations deployed, but only four of those are currently online. And the plan is to have about 16 of those online by the end of the year. And ultimately, SKA-Low will have 512 stations spread out to about, I think it’s 74 kilometers, whereas the MWA currently only goes out to about six kilometers. So that means you get a really great increase in resolution of the instrument so you can see much finer details and you’ll also have much greater sensitivity because of the larger number of stations.

I think for me the exciting thing is not all the things that they say they’re going to see with this instrument, but inevitably they’ll see things that they didn’t expect to see and that’s where I get excited …

Because again, it throws a curveball into our understanding of the universe. If you see something that you didn’t expect to see, that’s awesome.

That’s what keeps me excited each day.

If we just keep seeing the same thing over and over again, then you’re not really learning anything new. So it kind of challenges our current theories and understanding of the universe.

So … Yeah, that’s what gets me excited. 

Brendan: Exactly! Thank you. I’m looking forward to seeing those first few moments of the universe, which I’m fairly confident that the SKA is going to reveal … a lot of things we can hardly even imagine.

Okay, well, thank you so much, Dr. Emil Lenc, on behalf of all of our listeners and especially from me this has been fantastic it’s been really exciting to be speaking with you about your work finding out about your life and thank you especially for your time …  I know how incredibly busy you guys are … and good luck with your next adventures, and for all your future travels.

Brendan: Thanks Emil.

Emil: Oh you’re welcome … It’s been a pleasure. Have a great day.

Brendan: Bye!

Emil: Bye!

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