How Australian Radio-Astronomy will solve the Origin of Galaxies, Life, the Universe, and ..er.. everything.
Ray P Norris
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We pretty well understand how the Universe started, 13.7 billion years ago, as long as you donòÀÙt ask embarrassing questions like òÀÜWhat caused it?òÀÝ or òÀÜWhat was there before the Big Bang?òÀÝ. We can then plug in our physics, roll the scenario forward, and we find things like stars and galaxies forming pretty well as observed. Only trouble is, it all happens too slowly. In the real Universe, our most powerful telescopes see super-massive black holes forming within a billion years of the Big Bang, and weòÀÙve no idea why. We see stars turning on about the same time, and thatòÀÙs way too early for our models. So we know weòÀÙve got something wrong, and thatòÀÙs really exciting for a scientist, because thatòÀÙs when discoveries happen.
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The world astronomical community is attacking these challenges by planning to build a big new billion-dollar radio-telescope, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), either in Australia or South Africa. And right now, CSIRO is building a $100million SKA pathfinder telescope in Western Australia, which may solve some of these puzzles in only 2-3 years time.
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In this talk, IòÀÙll describe our current understanding of how stars, galaxies, and black holes formed after the Big Bang, and evolved into the modern Universe. Then IòÀÙll tell you why this is wrong, and show you some sneak previews of the telescope we are building to figure out why.