Australia Telescope

(Australia Telescope National Facility; ATNF AT) A radio telescope combining the principles of aperture synthesis and long baseline interferometry (LBI). Run by Australia's CSIRO, the AT produced its first image in April 1989. There are eight antennas in all, at three sites in New South Wales. Six 22-meter dishes at the Paul Wild Observatory, Narrabri, form the Compact Array. Five of these are movable along a 3-km railroad track, and the sixth lies a further 3 km to the west. The other two antennas are the 22-meter Mopra dish near Coonabarabran, close to the Siding Spring optical observatory, and the existing 64-meter dish at Parkes Observatory. When connected by radio links to the Compact Array they form the Australia Telescope Long Baseline Array. The AT can work up to 110 GHz with a bandwidth of 1 GHz. It has a maximum baseline of 300 km.

Collins Dictionary of Astronomy © Market House Books Ltd, 2006

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A series of observations with the National Science Foundation's Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia and the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) has--for the first time--homed in on three clear sources of AME light, the protoplanetary disks surrounding the young stars known as V892 Tau, HD 97048, and MWC 297.

Nanodiamonds Responsible for Mysterious Source of Microwaves across Milky Way

Chalmers scientists and colleagues from Germany and Australia used the CSIRO Australia Telescope Compact Array, an array of six 22-meter radio telescopes in New South Wales, Australia, to study a star at the end of its life.

Study of distant dying star may tell how Sun will eventually die

To further investigate the object, the team followed up with an 83-minute exposure using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and additional radio observations from the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA), located near the town of Narrabri in New South Wales.

NASA spots one of the youngest-known supernova remnants

White (University of Maryland) bolstered the notion with a decade-long series of radio images from the Australia Telescope Compact Array. Published earlier this year, the images suggest that some new material enveloped at least one of the two stars shortly after periastron and bottled up the ultraviolet radiation that ultimately energizes surrounding plasma, powering the radio emission.

Eta carinae's year of glory

The team then examined the black hole system with a radio telescope, the Australia Telescope Compact Array in Narrabri, and searched for the system in X-ray images taken by Chandra.

Jet astronomy: tracing the fire from black holes

Radio observations were made by the GBT, the Parkes radio telescope, the Australia Telescope Compact Array, and the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope.

Astronomers Uncover A 'Transformer' Pulsar

The Australia Telescope Compact Array's ability to detect CO is due to an upgrade that has boosted the telescope's bandwidth-the amount of radio spectrum it can see at any one time-sixteen-fold, from 256 MHz to 4 GHz, and made it far more sensitive, cutting the time needed for these observations by a factor of 20.

Raw material that helped create first stars detected

Kim and Staveley-Smith's team assembled the radio map at far right, using the Australia Telescope Compact Array and the 64-meter Parkes radio dish, also in Australia.

Pinpointing the Great Attractor