It’s awards season, and I don’t mean that flurry of red carpet, backslapping, “who are you wearing?” of the Golden Globes and Oscars. I mean the gold-medal geekery of October which sees both the awarding of the Nobel Prizes and the (almost as) prestigious Australian Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science.
(Image generated by Dall-E)
I’ll dive into this year’s Nobels at a later date but let’s take a moment to celebrate our best and brightest.
One of the great things about the PM’s Prizes is that they celebrate a range of scientists and also acknowledge excellence in primary and secondary school teaching. But the big gong, Scientist of the Year, went to astrophysicist Professor Matthew Bailes from Swinburne University. Bailes also leads the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) where he tests theories of gravity.
Image source: Australian Geographic
Among many achievements, Bailes was part of a team that discovered the first ever Fast Radio Burst (FRB) in 2007, via Australia’s Parkes Telescope. He describes this moment as laugh-out-loud because it was “ridiculously bright and absolutely perfect”. But at the same time, FRBs are shrouded in mystery. In fact some astronomers at the time simply did not believe that the FRB Bailes and his team detected could be real.
FRBs are super-short, intense blasts of radio waves from deep in space. While they last just milliseconds, they are incredibly powerful, briefly outshining the combined light of the entire galaxy from which they emerge. The 2007 burst is estimated to have come from an explosion that released as much energy in a millisecond as our sun would in 80 years!
We know very little about FRBs and in particular what causes them. Possibilities include magnetars (highly magnetised neutron stars), or massive cosmic events like star collisions. Australia is at the forefront of wishing to know more and we are developing a new burst-detection supercomputer for the ASKAP Telescope in WA that will find FRBs at a faster rate and find more distant sources.
FRBs puzzle astronomers because they appear random and come from various locations across the universe. But they contain rich data about the cosmic material they have traveled on their way to Earth. This helps us map the universe’s hidden structure and better understand the structure and amount of space beyond our galaxy.
For a full list of this year's winners and a link to all of their bios, go to: https://www.industry.gov.au/news/introducing-recipients-2024-prime-ministers-prizes-science
That’s all from me for now. If you'd like more geeky fun, please check out my other newsletters below, or connect with me on LinkedIn and/or X.
Yours in nerdiness,
Adam
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