| 10th of March 2020 |
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| Pawsey Medal |
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The Australian Academy of Science's Pawsey Medal for 2020 has been awarded
to Associate Professor Adam Deller from Swinburne University of Technology.
Adam uses high angular resolution radio imaging to study neutron stars
and black holes, the most compact objects in the Universe. To do so,
he developed the DiFX software correlator, which is capable of jointly processing
signals from radio antennas spread across the Earth and even on
orbiting satellites, and has been adopted by major astronomical
facilities world-wide. )The Long Baseline Array was the first
VLBI array to adopt DiFX.)
Adam's own usage of these facilities has led to breakthroughs including a time-lapse movie of the high-speed material launched by merging neutron stars in a galaxy 125 million light years away, which determined the orientation of the system first detected via the burst of gravitational waves emitted when they merged. Closer to home, he has pinpointed the location of neutron stars within the Milky Way galaxy with unprecedented precision, using radio observations so precise they could discern motion no greater than the width of a human hair at a distance of 2,000 km. The image above is a taken from a film clip in which Adam's describes his work. (Image and text credit: Australian Academy of Science) |