by
CSIRO Parkes
Observatory
Tomorrow and Friday, the official launch of the International Year of Astronomy (IYA) will be held during a gala opening ceremony at the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) headquarters in Paris.
It is supported by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and the United Nations.
About 600 participants are expected, among them eminent scientists (including Nobel Prize winners), and about 200 young students from over 100 countries. Sen. Kim Carr, the Minister for Science, Prof. Ron Ekers, the immediate past President of the IAU, and Dr Penny Sackett, the Chief Scientist of Australia, will be among those representing Australia at the launch.
The gala ceremony will be webcast live on Friday, 15 January. It can be viewed on the following web site by following the links.
http://www.astronomy2009 .org/
To help kick off the celebrations, 17 radio telescopes in Australia, Asia, Europe, North America and South America will track three quasars which are some of the most distant objects known in the Universe.
Using an astronomical technique called electronic, real-time Very Long Baseline Interferometry or e-VLBI, the participating telescopes will observe the same region of sky simultaneously.
The data from each telescope will be combined and processed in such a way that they will simulate a telescope as large as the Earth to produce high resolution images of these objects.
The Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe (JIVE) is coordinating these observations.
The data from each telescope is streamed through high-speed networks to a central processor at JIVE in the Netherlands.
The sister telescopes of The DISH, located at Narrabri and Coonabarabran are two of the radio telescopes involved.
CSIRO astronomers Dr Chris Phillips and Dr Tasso Tzioumis will control these radio telescopes remotely from Sydney.
The University of Tasmania’s 26 metre telescope near Hobart is the other Australian radio telescope taking part.
The Australian Academic and Research Network (AARNET) will be providing the internet services for transmitting the data to Europe for real-time processing.
Beginning at 7pm this Friday, this world-wide network of radio telescopes will conduct a nearly continuous 32-hour observation of the three quasars.
The demonstration will allow astronomers to generate images of these cosmic radio sources with up to one hundred times better resolution than images from the best optical telescopes.
The ability to send data electronically and to process it in real-time has the additional advantage of providing data to astronomers within hours of conducting the observations, rather than weeks later via the traditional method of recording data onto disks and shipping it to a central location for processing.
According to JIVE Director Huib Jan van Langevelde, "With VLBI we can zoom in on the most energetic events in the universe, and the new e-VLBI technique allows us to do this fast enough to catch such events on the time-scale that they occur."
CSIRO astronomer Dr Chris Phillips notes; "This demonstration is an unprecedented and extraordinary feat of coordination, involving 17 telescopes and 28 data networks around the world."
It is fantastic that Australia is involved in the global observations that kick off the global celebrations of the IYA. Galileo would be proud.
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