Astronomers meet in Sydney

An artist’s impression of the Giant Magellan Telescope from the the Giant Magellan Telescope home page

Almost 200 of Australia’s astronomers are meeting this week at Macquarie University. There are numerous topics of interest being discussed such as whether our home the Milky Way galaxy is warped and flared – the happy conclusion was that that is not the case. Another paper reported a new search for dead stars in the region of the Large Magellanic Cloud that extended the number of known such stars from 169 to a phenomenal 629 – with this many detailed statistical analysis can be carried out on their properties.

There has also been humour at the conference. Quote 1: “The Small Magellanic Cloud is like a chicken, at least in velocity space.” Quote 2: “Plot has not come out at all” (from research student horrified when his PowerPoint presentation only showed a blank slide). Quote 3: “Process is like running a horse backwards” (regarding the red-tape involved in developing a major new instrument).

There were also mentions of three important planned telescopes with which Australia is involved. One was the ANU’s SkyMapper telescope that will continually image and map the southern sky in multiple colours. The “first light” for this telescope at Siding Spring Observatory is expected in January 2008. Another was ASKAP (Australian SKA Pathfinder, where SKA stands for Square Kilometre Array) which is an array of 45 radio telescopes being built in Western Australia. This will be a highly sensitive instrument that will image a part of the sky as large as the Southern Cross in one go. Scientists expect that it will be completed in 2012. The final major intrument mentioned was the Giant Magellan Telescope, pictured above, that is being planned by an international consortium that includes the Australian National University. This telescope will be huge with seven mirrors each 8.4 metres in width. It will be the equivalent of a telescope with a mirror over 20 metres in width and will be able to take images up to ten times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope. It is likely to be built on top of a mountain in Chile and is expected to be completed in a decade or so.