After introducing the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre and describing the new HPC infrastructure being deployed, the presentation will focus on the astronomy projects supported at the centre, giving insights on current and future challenges, ending with an overview of the technology landscape and how future developments in technology will affect the scientific discovery workflow.
Pulsars are highly magnetised, fast spinning neutron stars. Their pulsations can be observed across an extremely wide electromagnetic window, from radio to high energy Gamma-ray. In this talk, I will briefly review observational properties of different populations of pulsars (e.g., young pulsars, magnetars and millisecond pulsars) and their emissions from radio to Gamma-ray. I will then focus...
The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is the next-generation observatory for ground-based gamma-ray astronomy. With more than 100 telescopes equipped with state-of-the-art technologies, it will provide a new view of the sky at energies from 20 GeV to 300 TeV at unprecedented sensitivity and angular resolution. Australia has a strong reputation in radio and optical astronomy and has made major...
More than a century after their discovery, the origin of cosmic rays is still a matter of debate. Gamma ray observations are one of the most powerful ways to test our ideas about cosmic ray origin. This is because gamma-ray photons are unavoidably produced in interactions between these energetic particles and interstellar matter. In this talk, I will briefly review the status of the field, and...
Very-high-energy (VHE) gamma-ray astroparticle physics is a relatively young field, and observations over the past decade have surprisingly revealed almost two hundred VHE emitters which appear to act as cosmic particle accelerators. These sources are an important component of the Universe, influencing the evolution of stars and galaxies. At the same time, they also act as a probe of physics...
Galaxy clusters host radio emission in different flavours and on very different angular scales: from the compact emission of staburst galaxies and "radio quiet" AGN, to the extended lobes of the more powerful radio galaxies, to the impressive megaparsec scale diffuse emission associated with the ICM in the form of halos and relics. The latter, as well as the lobes of radio galaxies, are best...
Fast radio bursts are enigmatic millisecond-scale radio transients reaching us from distant galaxies. Their studies are expected to yield information on their necessarily extreme progenitors - young magnetars, merging neutron stars, and/or even more exotic phenomena - as well as the cosmological distribution of gas in our Universe. The SKA promises to yield both the largest and deepest sample...
The interstellar medium is the lifeblood of galaxies, providing the raw material from which stars are born, and to which they return much of their matter when they die. Some of the biggest unknowns in galaxy evolution are tied to the detailed physics of the ISM: e.g. the multiple phase transitions needed to convert warm HI into star-forming gas, the role of feedback in regulating star...
To understand the origin of life in the Universe is one of the most outstanding questions in Astrophysics. Complex organic molecules (COMs; molecules containing carbon with more than 6 atoms) are believed to be the building blocks of prebiotic molecules and have been observed at several stages of the star and planet formation process: in cold and dense prestellar cores, in the hot-corinos...
Thousands of planets orbiting stars other than our own are being discovered. Since their discovery in the 1990s this field of astronomy and planetary science has exploded, being today one of the most exciting and dynamic. Even within the limits of our current observational capabilities, studies of extrasolar planets have provided a unique contribution to improving our view of the place that...
Spatially-resolved spectroscopy has enjoyed wide-spread use in the past decade, but there remains a divide between the detailed stellar observations obtainable at low redshift and the ionised gas typically used to map galaxies in the early universe. In this talk I will present MAGPI, the highest resolution spectroscopic survey of both gas and stars beyond z=0. The goal of MAGPI, the first...
Abstract: MAVIS is a new facility instrument for the VLT that will deliver diffraction-limited imaging and integral-field spectroscopic (IFS) capabilities over most of the southern sky, using a state-of-the-art wide-field multi-conjugate adaptive optics (MCAO) system. This complex instrument makes use of the Adaptive Optics Facility of the VLT, exploiting its multi-laser guided star system and...
Gravitational lensing acting as cosmic telescopes is allowing us to access high redshift galaxies at unprecedented small physical scales (tens of parsec) and faint luminosity, opening to the possibility of revealing the still elusive formation of globular clusters in the early Universe. Young stellar massive clusters are also the main sources of ionizing radiation and stellar feedback,...
The observations from the Gaia satellite and from the large spectroscopic surveys (Gaia-ESO, GALAH, APOGEE) during the last decade, have given a new perspective to the study of stellar populations in our Galaxy, shaping a quantitative approach to Galactic Archaeology.
The next few years will see a number of important projects, with instruments dedicated to spectroscopic surveys, such as...
Gravitational wave research in Australia takes many forms, from the development of instrumentation for direct detection and radio pulsar observing, to computational pipelines for detection and parameter estimation, optical and radio follow-up of neutron star mergers, and theory. Australia is part of two pulsar timing arrays, the Parkes pulsar timing array and the new MeerKAT Pulsar Timing...
Multi-messenger observations of the merger of two compact objects will help probe astrophysics at extreme conditions. In this talk, I will discuss the on-going technology development for rapid online gravitational wave (GW) detection, localization and mass parameter estimation, with a focus on pre-merger GW early warnings of binary coalescences. I will also discuss the prospects of...
The next decade of Universe exploration is expected to undergo a revolution for transient astrophysics. The third generation of gravitational-wave (GW) observatories, such as Einstein Telescope (ET) and Cosmic Explorer (CE) will allow us for the first time to observe GWs along the cosmic history back to the cosmological dark ages. These observatories will be an unprecedented resource to...
Abstract: GrailQuest (Gamma-ray Astronomy International Laboratory for Quantum Exploration of Space-Time) is an ambitious astrophysical mission concept that uses a fleet of small satellites whose main objective is to search for a dispersion law for light propagation in vacuo. Within Quantum Gravity theories, different models for space-time quantization predict relative discrepancies of the...
