[AstroNet] Astronomy public talk

[Kevin Govender]

The South African Square Kilometre Array Project invites you to a Public 
Talk

Title: Radio Astronomy, A brief history: from Karl Jansky to the SKA

Speaker: Prof. Roy Booth (Director: The Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy 
Observatory)

Date: Friday 4 December 2009

Time: 18h00 to 19h30

Venue: The Wallenberg Centre, Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, 
Stellenbosch

Entrance is free

Details of talk:
Celestial radio waves were discovered accidentally by a Radio Engineer, 
Karl Jansky, at Bell Laboratories in the USA. That was in the early 
1930s when Jansky was investigating sources of interference in 
communications! Since that time radio astronomy has gone from strength 
to strength through exciting discoveries and great improvements in 
techniques, such that radio astronomers now need to build their 
telescopes in remote areas to avoid man-made radio interference!

We will describe some of these developments which have included the 
detection of the cosmic background radiation, atomic hydrogen and even 
simple molecules in the Galaxy, Pulsars (rapidly rotating neutron 
stars), Radio Galaxies, the cosmic background radiation and black holes.

Today we are working on the most sensitive radio telescope ever, the 
Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and we hope that it will be built in the 
Karoo region of South Africa. With the SKA we hope to be able to detect 
radio emission from the earliest galaxies but only if we can avoid 
man-made interference!