[Music plays]
(Dr Douglas Bock) This is an exciting moment for Australia
because we’re part of a global project.
We’ve got some of the world’s best radio telescopes
and we’re using those together with the discovery of gravitational waves
from this great international project.
The Australia Telescope Compact Array is operated by CSIRO
near Narrabri in New South Wales.
We just had the 25th birthday of this telescope
but it’s had a programme of ongoing upgrades of instrumentation
that maintains it as one of the world’s best radio telescopes.
The Australia Telescope Compact Array because it can measure radio emission,
it can look at different parts of the environment of the explosion
or whatever it is that’s causing the gravitational waves we see.
So, we use gravity waves, we use optical light and we use radio waves
to understand the whole system, all the physics of what’s going on.
When Tara Murphy heard about this gravitational wave event
she contacted us and requested that we start
a target of opportunity programme
where we override the current schedule,
turn the telescope to this new task to follow up this exciting event
and we’ve been doing that now with 40 hours of observing time
and it’s an ongoing programme.
We're really excited to be working with Tara Murphy
at the University of Sydney.
She’s leading a great team and it’s great to be able to turn
one of Australia’s best scientific instruments,
the Australia Telescope Compact Array to this discovery.
[Music plays]
