The Best Australian Science Writing 2014 (35 page)

What we'll get from it – apart from prestige, and potential income from commercial applications of the science – is a peek into the parts of the universe that optical telescopes can't see, either because they're obscured by clouds of cosmic dust or because they're simply too far back in space–time. Radio waves are especially interesting to astronomers because, unlike visible light and other electromagnetic radiation, they travel the entire breadth of the universe without being absorbed and scattered by intervening matter.

As chief salesperson for the project in Australia, Harvey-Smith's unenviable task is to make it comprehensible, even to journalists. Thankfully, despite having written a doctoral thesis on 4.6 GHz hydroxyl masers (don't ask), she knows the value of a simple metaphor and an occasional wisecrack.

Early in her career, while working at Jodrell Bank Observatory in the UK, she informed the Royal Astronomical Society that
she'd discovered a giant cloud of alcohol nearly 463 billion kilometres wide floating around the Milky Way, but sadly it wasn't ‘fit for human consumption'. Radio telescopes, she explains, are the ‘X-ray specs' of astronomy.

That kind of drollery is handy out here in the remote midwest, where the locals are a sceptical lot toughened by a lifetime of mind-roasting summers, occasional cyclonic storms and encounters with venomous snakes. Since buying Boolardy and refitting it as a radio observatory, the CSIRO has worked hard to win over the neighbours, both black and white. The local Wajarri community has given its blessing to the telescopes, which all sport indigenous names, and Boolardy itself has been kept as a working cattle station managed by veteran pastoralist Mark Halleen and his wife Carolyn, who now find themselves hosting an ever-shifting roster of visiting physics nerds, computer technicians and international dignitaries.

For Halleen – who's lived out here for 41 years, having arrived at Boolardy as a ten-year-old – sharing breakfast with a bunch of people discussing interstellar gas clouds has proved a nice change of pace. ‘It's good chatting to all these people,' he says. ‘When they first came out we couldn't get them in for tea – the sky is so clear here at night they just couldn't take their eyes off it.'

The weekend of our visit, the CSIRO and the locals have pitched in to stage Astrofest, a meet-the-astronomers day held every two years under sunshades at the shire office, a low-slung building on the flat dirt highway next to the Oasis roadhouse motel. (Murchison Shire doesn't actually have a town, despite being larger than the Netherlands.) A healthy crowd of around 300 turns out, including locals, visiting amateur astronomers and adventurous tourists here for some star-gazing and astrophysics lessons. One of the pastoralists donates a cow for the roast dinner, the Wajarri community brings along a few dead kangaroos to cook in a camp-stove, and deputy shire president Rossco
Foulkes-Taylor – third-generation owner of nearby Yuin Station – opens proceedings with a bone-dry bushman's take on the theory of supermassive black holes.

‘I remember at the last Astrofest someone asked what would happen if the Earth gets too close to one of these black holes,' Foulkes-Taylor tells the crowd laconically. ‘And they reckoned we could be squashed into an area almost as small as a basketball. I thought, “Jeez, a basketball! That seems pretty tight.” Then about 15 minutes later someone else said that if you recalculate it, it could actually be as small as a golf ball. That was where he lost me. A footy, maybe – but a golf ball?

‘But I shouldn't make fun of them,' Foulkes-Taylor adds generously. ‘They're a lot smarter than me.'

The star speaker at this year's Astrofest is Professor Ken Freeman of the Australian National University, a 73-year-old astrophysicist who won the Prime Minister's Prize for Science in 2012 and is widely credited with discovering the mysterious, invisible substance known as dark matter that permeates the universe. After being introduced as a scientist with ‘more medals than a South American dictator', Freeman promises to keep his speech simple. But the Astrofest audience is soon sitting in polite incomprehension as he begins extemporising on the fascinating nature of axions, neutralinos, gigaelectronvolts, dwarf spheroidal galaxies and the cosmic ratio of baryons to total matter.

Afterwards, during the smoko break, a local station worker turns to his companion and remarks: ‘That was really interesting – but he lost me after “G'day”.'

* * * * *

Astronomy is a slow and expensive business. It's now more than two decades since the International Union of Radio Science proposed the idea of a massive radio telescope made up of thousands
of linked antennae, and 16 years since Australia signed up as one of six countries backing the project, by then officially known as the Square Kilometre Array. Longterm Murchison residents remember hearing as far back as 2001 that this futuristic project might come to their neighbourhood.

Australia has long been a world leader in astronomy, partly because the Southern Hemisphere offers a more widescreen view of the heavens and partly because our low population density means ideal conditions for radio telescopes. Large swathes of the Murchison have no mining, and no mobile phone towers; very few people live there. As part of its lobbying bid to host the SKA, Australia committed to building a prototype radio telescope and supercomputer facility in Western Australia.

By the time Lisa Harvey-Smith came aboard the project in 2009, two years after arriving in Australia to pursue post-graduate work, the Federal Government had committed more than $100 million to it. Construction of the 36 prototype radio dishes, known as the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), began in 2010. Boolardy underwent a total refit that included accommodation blocks, power generators and a supercomputing system, while down in Perth a second supercomputer facility, the Pawsey Centre, was built for $80 million. A separate radio telescope system called the Murchison Widefield Array – those spider-like contraptions – was jointly built by the CSIRO and 12 other Australian and international science bodies. The total cost so far, according to a ministerial statement released in mid-2013, has been $70 million in WA government funding and $365 million in federal money.

Given all the build-up, there was an undercurrent of anticlimax when the committee overseeing the SKA announced in May 2012 that the telescopes would be split between Australia and Africa. The Murchison, it turns out, won't be dotted with 3000 radio dishes, as artists' drawings had envisaged – Africa will
get the lion's share. Still, says Harvey-Smith, even snagging a piece of the SKA is a massive coup that presages a golden era in Australian astronomy and physics research.

‘Australia is really the envy of the world,' she says. ‘When we go to Europe, they're having a miserable time with funding for astronomy. Here it's a renaissance, really.'

This being astronomy, it's a renaissance that won't happen quickly. The dishes of the ASKAP will remain in test-mode for at least a year. Construction of the SKA itself won't begin until 2018 and it won't be operational for a decade, on current projections. But the smaller spider-like telescopes of the Murchison Widefield Array have just come on-stream and are already sending their data to the supercomputers in Perth; the digital information is distributed to astrophysicists around the world who know how to translate it into cool technicolour pictures of the universe's farthest reaches.

How that's done is a process even Lisa Harvey-Smith struggles to explain, except to say that it involves interferometry and Fourier Transform theory – two subjects that fall under the broad heading ‘Trust me, I'm an astrophysicist'. Some people, of course, are wont to ask why we'd spend upwards of half a billion dollars to study a swirling miasma of hot gas 10 billion light-years away, a question that can make astronomers a little defensive.

Astrophysics, they point out, has produced many unforeseen spin-offs, including medical imaging and wi-fi, which the CSIRO helped develop, reaping royalties of hundreds of millions of dollars. The supercomputers attached to the SKA could produce the next such innovation, and will be available to researchers across a wide range of scientific disciplines.

‘It isn't just intellectual curiosity,' says Harvey-Smith. ‘Space is our most valuable laboratory to test fundamental theories of physics, because it's full of vast distances and unimaginable extremes of temperature and pressure. Einstein's theories of
space, time and matter were developed and tested through measurements of outer space, and the science that has flowed from that has led to massive advances in life expectancy and the technology that enables us to watch live footy, use mobile phones, have CT scans and surf the internet. It would be hard to overstate how profoundly it's affected our lives.

‘Anything else you want to know?'

Yes: don't astrophysicists ever feel existentially overwhelmed by the sheer vastness of all those billions of galaxies and trillions of stars expanding through infinite time and space?

‘No, you try not to think about that, it's too depressing. After a while you just accept that you're a speck.'

* * * * *

Back at Boolardy, on the morning of our departure, station manager Mark Halleen is sitting on his trailbike when a battered truck trundles up. Behind the wheel is Sandy McTaggart of neighbouring Mt Narryer Station. McTaggart's 200 000 hectare property is named after the granite mountain that rises within its boundaries, a place where geologists back in the 1980s retrieved fragments of zircon that proved to be the oldest known substances on Earth. A lot of geologists have been back to Mt Narryer and nearby Jack Hills since that discovery, and have confirmed that their craggy red terrain dates back more than 4 billion years, to a time when Earth was not much more than a ball of hot lava. It's the most ancient landscape on the planet, which makes the location of the nearby radio telescopes – pointed back through time to the earliest moments of the universe – feel remarkably synchronous.

The McTaggarts tried to buy Mt Narryer in order to protect it for future generations, only to discover that freehold possession is legally impossible. These days they're hoping that the
government's massive investment in the SKA will rule out mining in the area – the future safeguarding the past. Like a lot of pastoral properties in the Murchison, Mt Narryer Station has been depleted by drought and historical overgrazing: Sandy McTaggart only runs 500 head of cattle these days, and the morning he turns up at Boolardy he's earning some extra income doing road-work for the shire. You could forgive him for grumbling – the money spent running these telescopes for three days would pay an entire year of the shire's wild-dog bounty – but it turns out that cosmology quite fascinates him.

‘I'm interested in the origins of the universe,' he says affably. ‘They reckon that the deeper into space you look, the further back in time you go. So when you're looking at other galaxies you're actually looking at light from millions of years ago. It's the big question, isn't it: how did it all begin? Every religion was spawned on the basis of it.'

Halleen nods and says: ‘That's dead right.'

A short walk in the Australian bush

The oldest known star

Liner notes,
Voyager
Golden Record

Meredi Ortega

01
blue planet ambassadors                                                                  well versed in sifting emptiness

cut star to star from space, humpbacks still appear safety scissored

in need of pasting back

after UN greetings, they sing something along the lines of

the water's beautiful, come on in

all twinkle-eyed leviathan

02
this mudpot is spluttering oes                                                       in another clabbery universe

this grey mud is falling in love, taking up flute

03
crickets chirping in space

it gets funnier as the centuries pass and there's the rub

of flight into song, thunder into surf

perhaps what those Californians say is true, about crickets and elephants

and planets all quavering the same way

all harking back to the big nothing                                                                  or something

04
hyena's laugh                                                                  bone ravening, raving

                                            we send the devil interstellar

played backwards

it is only moon chirr and the lone night song of a prairie mouse