Can you give me a one-page description of the Parkes Radio Telescope first?
Yes. In a remote paddock 20 km north of Parkes, NSW, is a giant 64-metre dish. The strange metallic structure is a telescope – astronomers use it to study the heavens! Astronomers are curious about things in our galaxy, and beyond our galaxy out in the universe. To astronomers the world is one big workshop, and telescopes are its tools. This dish – together with its electronic systems – is one of those tools, but it is sensitive to radio energy not light. It is used to measure radio properties of specific celestial phenomena, by a succession of visiting astronomers from around the world, in experiments that last typically several days. Astronomers have known for years that cosmic radio energy is created, as naturally as heat and light, by such things as quasars, galaxies, molecular clouds, supernovae and pulsars. This radio energy shines, weakly, on every square metre of the Earth’s surface. The ground underneath the dish does not get its “fair share” of radio energy: it is intercepted
