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25.01.2022 Clusters of galaxies are the biggest structures in our Universe, bound together by gravity- and long suspected to also be connected by filaments of diffuse gas. This is what astronomers refer to as ‘the cosmic web.’ In a world-first with radio data from the GLEAM survey, MWA researchers led by Dr Tessa Vernstrom from CSIRO were able to detect these faint bridges between clusters of galaxies. Read more in their paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.09331.pdf

22.01.2022 Modern astronomy is built on advances in computing, allowing us to collect more and more data and process it as quickly as possible. Look for the photo of an MWA antenna tile in the Nature article linked below, which discusses different code that changed the world- one of which is the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), used by astronomers to produce images of the sky, such as the famous GLEAM image of the radio sky over the Murchison.

19.01.2022 Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, those things are too close to Earth. What we're interested in are radio signals that happened a long, long time ago, in galaxies far, far away, made by the infamous 'little green men'. Astronomers Dr Chenoa Tremblay and Professor Steven Tingay used the MWA to conduct the deepest and broadest search yet for extraterrestrial signals, in an area covering over 10 million star systems. Buzz Lightyear gives a spoiler for their results, but you can read more about this work, and find the paper release here: https://www.icrar.org/looking-for-ET/

19.01.2022 Have you ever wanted the chance to work on a telescope? Curtin University, the lead organisation of the MWA, is looking to recruit a full-time electronics technician to install, repair and maintain a range of scientific equipment. For more information about the role, and how to apply, click the link below: http://staff.curtin.edu.au/job-vacancies/?ja-job=249644

17.01.2022 Listen below to Episode 6 of the Pawsey Capital Refresh podcast, which focuses on the MWA's new 78-node computing cluster. This will provide enhanced GPU capabilities to power AI, computational work, machine learning workflows and data analytics for astronomers. MWA Director Melanie Johnston-Hollitt also announces the name of the new system, the Wajarri word for 'spider': Garrawarla!

14.01.2022 Q: What do gas lighters and cosmic rays have in common? A: Radio pulse profiles.... No, seriously, just ask PhD candidate Alexander Williamson, who sent a fellow scientist out to the MWA to click a barbeque gas lighter around the antennas. But this wasn’t some practical joke- it was an experiment to test a new observing mode of telescope! The idea is that cosmic rays, the highest-energy particles in nature, create a huge ‘extensive air shower’ of secondary particles when they hit the top of the Earth’s atmosphere. Some of those particles reach ground level, and give off a burst of radio-waves lasting less than a microsecond. In order to detect these tiny bursts, Williamson and a Curtin-based team developed an ultra-high-time resolution mode for the MWA. But how to test it? They needed something that made similar bursts of radio-waves, that could be controlled. That’s where the gas lighter comes in. Each time you click it, a spark is generated via a piezoelectric, which for a split-second *also* produces radio waves. Pretty cool, huh? Detecting these rare particles is a big step in the investigation of the origin of cosmic rays. Read more about the new ultra-high-time resolution mode of the MWA, the impact of interference, and the gas lighter experiment in Williamson’s paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.04619

13.01.2022 Are you an expert in low frequency radio astronomy? Would you like the opportunity to be on the Time Assignment Committee (TAC) of the MWA? We are seeking up to 4 new TAC members, details below: Members of the international astronomical community are invited to nominate for positions on the Time Allocation Committee (TAC) of the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA). The closing date for nominations is Friday 11 September 2020. The TAC is the committee that reviews and grades prop...osals for time on the MWA. The TAC meets twice a year, to assess proposals in the field of low frequency radio interferometry including but not limited to studies of the Sun and ionosphere, low frequency continuum and polarimetric imaging, Epoch of Reionisation observations, and low frequency radio transients. Members are appointed for a term of two years and we are seeking up to four new members of the TAC. New members will join the TAC beginning at its September/October 2020 meeting. Current TAC members are listed here: https://www.mwatelescope.org/team/people#TAC Nominees are asked to send their name, affiliation and a <100 word summary of their specialisation to the MWA Director, Prof. Melanie Johnston-Hollitt ([email protected]) by Friday 11 September 2020. Please include in the subject line of your email that you are applying for consideration as a member of the MWA TAC. Members of the TAC will be appointed by the MWA Board after consideration of the balance of expertise, geographical distribution, and diversity. For further information, about the operation of the TAC please contact the MWA Principal Scientist, Dr Luke Pratley ([email protected]).

11.01.2022 Here's A/Prof. Cathryn Trott, spokes person of the MWA's EoR Team, talking about the latest work to put limits on the EoR which was a combined effort with industry:

08.01.2022 Physics World interview with the MWA Director, Prof. Melanie Johnston-Hollitt, talking about her career, the MWA, the SKA, and new discoveries we've made (interview from 22:00min to 37:30 min and 52:04 to 53:30):

08.01.2022 MWA Director, Professor Melanie Johnston-Hollitt talks to the Astrophiz podcast about her career, science, and the MWA: https://astrophiz.com//astrophiz101-prof-melanie-johnston/

06.01.2022 The MWA was used to identify the biggest eruption ever known, taking place over hundreds of millions of years in deep space. MWA Director and paper co-author Prof Melanie Johnston-Hollitt says this finding underscores the importance of studying the Universe at different wavelengths. It’s a bit like archaeology, she says. We've been given the tools to dig deeper with low frequency radio telescopes so we should be able to find more outbursts like this now.

06.01.2022 Wild camels with an appreciation for big data science projects have been spotted on site, resting up near some of our long-baseline antennas.

04.01.2022 Over 700 hours of MWA data have been used to produce upper limits on the signal from the first generations of stars at the beginning of the Universe, known as the Epoch of Reionisation (EoR). This new paper by astrophysicist A/Prof Cathryn Trott has the world's best EoR limits at a number of redshifts, adding to the other leading results with the MWA by Dr Nichole Barry and Wenyang Li last year. It contains data from all three of the EoR observing fields across the full frequ...ency range of the telescope. The image below from the paper shows the main beam of the MWA pointed directly at one of those deep-space fields. Fun fact (pulled from the ICRAR article on this work, https://www.icrar.org/dug-data/): The project involves an enormous 200 terabytes of data. This is roughly the same as downloading all 73 episodes of Game of Thrones 1,800 times. The paper was accepted for publication in MNRAS and can be found here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.02575

04.01.2022 The MWA Program Manager, Mia Walker, will be part of the line up tomorrow night for CSIRO's National Science Week webinar on the SKA. The free webinar also features colleagues from CSIRO, ASTRON & DISER. Register below:

04.01.2022 This incredible video by Aman Chokshi captures one of the many lightning storms that occurred over the Murchison Radio-Astronomy Observatory, and the beautiful night sky above the clouds. Aman visited the site in February for his PhD project, and studies how the shape of the MWA telescope beam affects our ability to detect signals from the very early Universe.

03.01.2022 The new MWA-dedicated HPC facility 'Garrawarla' has arrived! Read about it here:

01.01.2022 Did you know that to a radio telescope like the MWA, the sky is, well- kind of noisy! In fact, radio astronomers do a lot of work sorting out different types of noise from each other: there’s background noise, system noise, and even "source noise" from the very objects we observe (such as black holes and galaxies). Source noise is usually weak enough to be ignored, but Dr John Morgan and Professor Ron Ekers decided to take a closer look. In a new paper they observed a giant galaxy, Virgo A, with the MWA. They found that source noise was easily detected. What does this mean for other low-frequency telescopes, like the future Square Kilometre Array (SKA)? Read their results here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.11851

01.01.2022 Some of the MWA Operations and Management Team today at the MWA Project Meeting. These are the amazing people that make the MWA a success! Left to right: Phil Giersch (MWA Electronics Technician), Brian Crosse (Correlator Architect and soon to be Acting Principal Engineer), Greg Sleap (MWA Data Manager), Mia Walker (MWA Program Manager), Prof. Melanie Johnston-Hollitt (MWA Director), Dr Andrew Williams (MWA Monitoring & Control Engineer), Jake Jones (CIRA Engineer; designer of many MWA systems), Rike McLernon (MWA Administrative Officer), A/Prof. Randall Wayth (Principal Engineer), Dave Emrich (MWA Hardware Manager). Not shown: Dr Luke Pratley (Principal Scientist), Andy McPhail (Fieldwork and Operations Coordinator), Harrison Barlow (MWA-ASVO Developer).