Dr Andrew Zic has received the Astronomical Society of Australia’s Louise Webster Prize for 2024.

Andrew is using observations of pulsars to search for weak ripples in the fabric of space and time known as gravitational waves. He led the third data release of the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array project using Murriyang, our Parkes radio telescope.

For almost two decades, the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array project team has used pulsars to create a gravitational-wave detector the size of the Milky Way. They are looking for tiny delays in the pulsar’s signal caused by gravitational waves. Decades of data are available for this unique way of seeing the Universe.

Andrew and his colleagues used the third data release to identify signatures of long-period gravitational waves produced by supermassive binary black holes at the heart of distant galaxies.

The annual Louise Webster Prize is awarded by the Astronomical Society of Australia in recognition of outstanding research by a scientist early in their post-doctoral career.