Another Exciting ATNF/AAO Director's Tea!

An Invasion:

At one point the ATNF director, Brian Boyle (who used to be AAO director too),
was surrounded by Ingrid Stairs, Bill Harris, Dave Hanes, Terry Bridges and
myself and exclaimed "the Canadians are coming!" ... i sang a line of "O Canada" in french. Add Robert Braun to the end of the line we were sitting in and at least 20 percent of the attendees were canucks. As guests we took 2/3 of the seats and so most people were standing.

Of course Bill and Dave will give colloquia - Bill's is this arvo (afternoon) on
the history of elliptical galaxy evolution using HST images while Dave's on
Friday is on the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory.

And yet another way to detect pulsars (Robert Braun and Patrick*):

And the impact is on array configurations for SKA. If the spacings between
antennas are regular, then the fan beams overlap allowing one to digitally
produce beams between antennas. This creates a primary beam with a gain of
something like 12 in sensitivity compared to using one antenna on its own.
Ambiguities in position can be removed by observing the same target at 2
different times. This makes interferometers competitive with single dishes for
pulsar surveys, especially in compact configurations. What do you think Stacie? Regular in the compact centre and irregular in the outer regions of the SKA?

And science gets wackier all the time (Ron Ekkers and Clancy from Adelaide;
presented by Clancy):


What an enthused and assured presentation this one was! The idea is that
neutrinos interacting with the moon's surface will produce a nanosecond pulse in the radio regime (the moon's surface is rather transparent to radio waves). So
you look for a geometry in which CR from a strong source (like Centaurus A
region or Saggitarius A*) are grazing the moon's limb at night and you point
your array at that point on the limb closest to the CR source. If I remember
correctly this happens about 3 time in each of Feb, Mar and May. To date they
have got the instrument's timing to under a nanosecond (they bin in half
nanoseconds), have explored detecting quasars, and they think they have detected the observatory's visitor centre. :-)))) They have determined that they aren't
affected by wireless mice. And they are poised to begin their search for moon
pulses. Detections and non-detections alike, at a range of low frequencies,
will elliminate various exotic constructs for dark matter particles.

Comment by Brian, in reference to Dave's promotion of SNO: Now that we have the solar neutrino problem solved, we have to solve the lunar neutrino problem. :-)


P.S.

I had a most fantastic visit to Swinburne University of Technology's
Astrophysics and Supercomputing Centre. UM's Experimental Media Centre, me, Chris Fluke and David Barnes will set up a collaboration. 3D stereo desktop
monitors and 3D visualization astronomy tools exist and Chris is checking out
whether he can send a monitor to me at ATNF so I can play!!

* I seem to only catch people's first names the first time they are introduced.

Astronomy in Australia

It is very exciting to be at a site where there are 2 large institutes - Australia Telescope National Facility and the Anglo-Australian Observatory. So many good colloquia and discussions!

First there was a talk by Matthew Bailes from Swinburne Uni. He's director of the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing.
He gave a talk on detecting pulsars using software techniques - improving FFTs and using their supercomputer (185 Dell dual cores). I'm going to visit Swinburne (in Melbourne) on Monday. Here's a great paper from their group on inserting 3D figures in pdf's http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/s2plot/3dpdf/
We should definitely do this for our papers! Please check it out Jason :-)

Then there was Wed morning coffee... very similar in intent to ours -- people talk about news and their own results and other people's work that they think is interesting. Except that there are 30 people (and only enough seats for 10) so it is very energetic. For example Simon Johnson described the gamma-ray pulsar that isn't found in radio - probably because the radio beam is narrower than the gamma-ray one and not oriented towards us. The ATNF director Brian Boyle pointed out that there is a new radio astro technique (low freq?) for detecting lensing in clusters - a Nature paper. Ron Ekkers pointed out a newspaper article that turned a paper's speculation into a discovery which led Helen Simm, their EPO/IYA person, to poll the group as to their feelings about this (e.g. do astronomers think this is inevitable? (yes) Do they accept/like it? (no) What can we do about it?) And Robert Braun, who grew up in Winnipeg(!) - i thought he was American+Dutch, pointed out a terrific technique to use when observing with Parkes. People also mentioned that their own papers (e.g. Naomi McClure-Griffiths' GASS survey) were submitted or accepted, generating congratulations from the attendees. (p.s. Naomi is pregnant :-))

And then there was a colloquium by Peter Kalberla who is also here on sabbatical. Terrific stuff! He finds a lagging, clumping HI thick disk and that the thin disk has an exponential distribution. Also he finds a Milky Way's dark matter model, which fits the HI flaring well, has a component that is an exponential disk that has a ring enhancement. One paper is http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008A%26A...487..951K
and he will be one of the authors of an Annual Reviews in Astronomy and Astrophyics article on the HI in the Milky Way -- first such article since Dickey and Lockman 1990. Which reminds me - Adam could you please put on your shelves the ARA&A and other astro texts (not binders or photos or beer bottles) from my glassed in cabinet? I believe theresa has the key to my office.

And then there is the Canadian contingent - all at one time or another engaged in globular clusters (including yours truly). Dave Hanes (Queen's U.) just walked into the canteen and was shocked to find me there. Bill Harris (MacMaster) will be here Tuesday for a couple of days. Terry Bridges (Queen's sort of) will be at the AAO for a month and we went on a hike and a swim in the Hawkesbury river on Sunday :-)

NGC 4945 will be my campaign while i'm here - i'll keep you posted. I'm working with Baerbel Koribalski and I'm going to the ATCA at Narrabri in the middle of Nov. Theresa is invited to do likewise in January. Also on the campaign will be Ken Freeman (KCF) and Mike Dopita (MAD) - we'll propose to use MAD's IFU on the 2.3 m at Siding Spring.

KCF was here on Thursday and jumped up to give me a big hug. He was sitting beside John Dickey, at a picnic table by the canteen, who exclaimed "Jayanne! i didn't recognize you!" I wonder if the gray hair is throwing people off :-))) At anyrate I think I have an invitation to visit John in Tasmania (King Island creme and cheese - here i come!) Lister Stavely-Smith however wasn't surprised - he's now at U of Western Australia working on the SKA pathfinder. These folk were visiting for some sort of committee meeting. I waved to Brian Gaensler (who don't think recognized me) and i'm sure i saw Jeremy Mould wandering the grounds too. I'm looking forward to seeing who else turns up!

Enjoy astrogroup coffee (feel free to pass this on to the astrogroup folk who aren't on the blog) and cherish the hunt for another UM research astronomer!
more later
galaxyGal