Federation Fellowship for Dick Manchester

On 24 March 2003, the Minister for Education, Science and Training, the Honorary Dr Brendan Nelson MP, announced the award of 24 Federation Fellowships, the Australian Research Council's most prestigious and valuable research awards. Included in the list was the ATNF's Dr Dick Manchester, one of three Fellowships awarded to CSIRO researchers in this round. This is the second Federation Fellowship to be hosted by the ATNF, with our ex-Director Professor Ron Ekers being awarded one last year (see October 2002 Newsletter). Dick hopes to take up his Fellowship on 1 June this year.

Dr. Dick Manchester

The title of Dick's project is "Precision Pulsar Timing and its Applications". The aim is to combine timing data from a large sample of millisecond pulsars, widely distributed across the sky, with two main objectives: (a) to detect gravitational waves passing over the Earth and (b) to establish a long-term standard of time based on pulsars. Gravitational waves are predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity and are generated by any accelerated mass. Potentially observable sources include early phases of the Universe around the epoch of galaxy formation and binary black holes in the cores of merged galaxies. Despite much past and current effort, so far there has been no direct detection of gravitational waves, although the famous Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar has given strong indirect evidence of their existence. Millisecond pulsars have period stabilities, which rival those of the best atomic clocks. Combining data from many such pulsars will give a timescale, which is likely to be more stable over intervals of months and years than the global time standard, Universal Time Coordinated (UTC), which is based on data from the world's most stable atomic clocks.

Much of the observational work will be based at Parkes but international collaboration is important to the project in order to obtain data on northern-hemisphere pulsars. The project will use the new 10/50-cm receiver, currently under construction and due for installation and commissioning at Parkes in September this year. Dealing with radio-frequency interference within the wide bands of this receiver will be an essential aspect of the project. One of our current Bolton Fellows, Dr George Hobbs, will join the project and another post-doctoral appointment will be advertised later this year.

Lister Staveley-Smith
(Lister.Staveley-Smith@csiro.au)