College of Sydney
The venerable Molonglo radio telescope in Australia has obtained a brand new lease on life.
In late 2023, the College of Sydney formally retired its 60-year-old observatory and eliminated many of the supporting gear. Final 12 months, the entire facility, together with its 84-hectare of grounds, was put up on the market.
Fortunately, Molonglo wasn’t purchased by a scrap steel service provider however by aerospace marketing consultant and IT entrepreneur Johann Bell. Bell plans to make use of the observatory primarily for house area consciousness observations, which includes detecting and monitoring satellites). Bell says radio astronomy observations may even turn into attainable once more.
Enochlau / Wikimedia Commons
The Molonglo Cross Telescope (named after a close-by river) was constructed within the early Sixties by radio astronomer Bernard Mills. Positioned some 30 kilometers (20 miles) east of Canberra, Australia’s capital, it has two perpendicular arms, every a few mile lengthy, that encompass cylindrical antennas with many a whole bunch of radio receivers.
Over the many years, the observatory carried out pioneering surveys of the southern radio sky at comparatively low frequencies. In 1968, it found the Vela pulsar (the brightest pulsar within the sky), and after an improve in 2015, it was a prolific hunter of quick radio bursts –millisecond-duration explosions, seemingly from distant magnetars.
With the appearance of recent services, together with the enormous Sq. Kilometre Array (SKA), the College of Sydney felt it was time to retire the outdated telescope. At a public public sale in 2025, Bell purchased the observatory for A$1.25 million (equal to $890,000 within the U.S.).
Inside months, because of the assistance of radio astronomers Duncan Campbell-Wilson (College of Sydney) and Tim Bateman (College of New South Wales), massive components of the observatory have been up and operating once more. In early April this 12 months, the staff detected and measured the Vela pulsar in a case of “second first mild.”
“I wished to be sure that the telescope is just not going to be mothballed or demolished,” says Bell. Though he’s undecided but how usually astronomers can have the chance to make use of the ability, Bell believes Molonglo will at the least proceed to play an vital position in coaching and schooling.
