An ICRAR student has made the first significant scientific finding using an SKA prototype.
PhD student Christopher Lee used the Aperture Array Verification System 2.0 (AAVS2) SKA-Low prototype station to detect the smallest structure seen to date in the magnetic field within the Vela supernova remnant.
The research used the bright radio light from the Vela pulsar like a torch, illuminating previously unseen magnetic field patterns in the ionised gas surrounding the pulsar.
“Even though it’s one of the most studied pulsars in all of pulsar astronomy, we’re still able to find out new things about it because of the low frequencies that we’re observing at,” Chris said.
The paper, based on Chris’ honours research under the supervision of Dr Ramesh Bhat and Dr Marcin Sokolowski, was published earlier this week in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.
While the AAVS2 station has been used in engineering testing and verification research for the SKA-Low, the team believes this is the first time a prototype station has been used to make a scientific discovery.
Composite image of the SKA-Low telescope in Western Australia. The image blends a real photo (on the left) of the SKA-Low prototype station AAVS2.0 which is already on-site, with an artist’s impression of the future SKA-Low stations as they will look when constructed. These dipole antennas, which will number in their hundreds of thousands, will survey the radio sky at frequencies as low as 50Mhz. Credit: ICRAR, SKAO.
“It is the first scientifically interesting result from an SKA-Low prototype station, and quite a neat result in terms of scientific relevance,” Dr Bhat said.
“This demonstrates that SKA-Low stations can be used as powerful pulsar monitoring facilities even at their early stages of construction and validation and to learn a lot about small-scale structure in interstellar space.”
“It’s a real privilege to be able to be one of the first people to see the data coming out of these stations,” Chris said.
“And not just one of the engineers seeing the testing data, but actually seeing the first scientifically useful data coming out of the telescope.”
Publication
Lee, C. P., Bhat, N. D. R., Sokolowski, M., Meyers, B. W., & Magro, A. (2024). Probing magneto-ionic microstructure towards the Vela pulsar using a prototype SKA-Low station. Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, 41
Header image credit: ESO/VPHAS+ team.
