The black hole that ate its own star. This is some neat science!
A new paper reports that VFTS 243, a massive binary system featuring an O-class star and a 10 solar-mass black hole companion, might have formed through the 'complete collapse scenario'.
I forgot to post this a couple weeks back! It was the 20-year anniversary of one of the first exoplanets
ever found - and it was lurking around a pulsar!
Draugr (Norse for "undead creatures") is one of three planets that orbits the pulsar Lich (also an undead creature).
The official name of the system is PSR B1257+12 and it features the three planets in orbit around the nasty pulsar.
It's located about 1900 light-years away in the constellation Virgo and was discovered in 1994, two years after the first two exoplanets were found around Lich.
The EXTREMELY NEAT thing about Draugr is that, to date, it remains the least massive exoplanet ever discovered, even when compared to the planets in our Solar System - which tells us something!
Found through pulsar timing, its mass is only ~2 times the lunar mass.
The first SKA-low antennas are being installed today in Australia!
Here's a feature article I wrote (2021) that outlines the road that has led to the development of the world's largest radio telescope for #SpaceAustralia
However, a secondary paper from a few days back, which also used JWST MIRI, found no evidence of the compact remnant in their data: https://arxiv.org/html/2402.14014v1
Almost 2 years ago I wrote a feature article looking at the evidence for this, so these new papers and findings are exciting!
It's been a few months since I've done some proper science writing for #SpaceAustralia (Phd Lyfe) but thought this new paper drop was interesting to write about!
Australian astronomers have used radio waves to look deep into the heart of the Globular Cluster 47 Tucanae & found an undiscovered radio source.
The newly found radio source could potentially be the first evidence of an intermediate-mass black hole in the core of a Globular Cluster, or a pulsar that is real close to the centre.
Was looking through old #astrophotography images and came across this - the furthest, and oldest light I have ever captured in our Universe, from my backyard.
Quasar 3C 232 at redshift ~0.533, which makes these photons about ~7.3 billion years old.
NGC 3067, a mere 67 million light-years away.
cannot begin to tell you how extremely luminous these things must be, for its light to be this bright that a small, 8" backyard telescope in city skies can see its light.
Of course, since this light left this object, the Universe has expanded, and so the light has been stretched or 'redshifted'.
Oh, and a fun fact about quasars, particularly, radio quasars.
Without them, you can't use your Google Maps, have self-driving cars, track natural disasters, or know where your aircraft is.
All of our GNSS needs knowledge of Earth's orientation in space!
Researchers recently published a shocking statistic about the Australian education science curricula for grades 11/12 - a clear bias in the gender representation of scientists with only one female scientist listed.
Dr Shanika Galaudage, a co-author of the study, comments on the key findings and talks about these results and the importance of the IncludeHer movement.
📺 Tune into ABC Catalyst tonight (8:30pm) to check out our team and story on converting data from
Space into sounds (sonification) in Astronomy.
That’s my boss (the awesome Dr George Hobbs) riding on our beautiful Murriyang (Parkes radio telescope).
A while back I wrote a piece for #SpaceAustralia on the importance of sonification, in particular, to make Astronomy more accessible and inclusive to extended audiences. It's an excellent topic of science but requires a lot of ableism (vision) to mostly participate in.
But sonification can help change this - as human audio capability is amazing!
And our results (along with our international colleagues) have dropped!
Our team (and others) have started to see the strongest evidence as yet of the stochastic gravitational wave background - ripples in space-time cause by ALL the supermassive black holes in the history of the Universe colliding!
We use pulsars to study these riplles and we needed almost 20 years of data to even get the first hints! It's the long game!
I'm a co-author on the Aussie papers (as part of my work) but I also wrote about it here in my latest feature article on #SpaceAustralia
This is why I have been going on about pulsars for a few weeks now - this was coming!
In about a week, an important chapter in #RadioAstronomy and Australian space heritage will come to a close.
The Molongolo Observatory, operating for 58 years and the last Mills Cross in Aust. will cease operations. 😭
The telescope recently had received some upgrades, but after almost 60 years of operations - its time has come.
It's had an incredible run, hosting over 50 PhDs, mapping the southern skies and training a generation of radio astronomers.
The design was pioneered by the work of Bernard Mills, with a prototype, known as the Mills Cross once developed at the Fleurs field station in Badgery's Creek in Sydney - where the new airport is currently being built.
It's also where a memorial and a small container of ashes of the radio astronomer pioneer, Grote Reber, are located (other telescopes also have Reber memorials too).
Over its time, this telescope has made such a significant impact in astronomy.
Besides the historical impact, MOST also was in recent times doing some excellent FRB science, and of course, all these years of knowledge in the radio astro community + instrumentation + survey results will go towards the SKA project.
So, now we say goodbye to a fantastic piece of Australian science infrastructure that holds a special place in the hearts of many who have come to know this gentle giant.
But we celebrate and thank its huge contribution to radio astronomy for nearly 60 years!
Did you know, we have a detector the size of the Galaxy?! But what the heck can we use it for?
Well, we're looking for the gravitational wave background, and we're using pulsars to do it!
In part three of this series, I take a dive into what Pulsar Timing Arrays are, some of the challenges they face & how they can improve their sensitivity.