SCIENCE AT THE SHINE DOME canberra 6 - 8 may 2009

Early-career researchers

Thursday, 7 May 2009

PAWSEY MEDAL

Associate Professor Stuart Wyithe
University of Melbourne

Stuart Wyithe is an Australian Research Council QEII Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Following completion of his PhD in 2001, he worked as a Hubble fellow at Harvard University before returning to Australia in 2003. His primary research interests lie in the evolution of the earliest galaxies and how this evolution may be studied with the next generation of radio telescopes.

The first galaxies

Over the last decade observational cosmology has matured to the point where quantities such as the mass, composition and age of the universe are now measured with a precision of a few percent. In contrast, the formation of the first galaxies in the universe remains very poorly understood. For example, we do not know at what time the first galaxies formed, what they looked like or how massive they were. The origins of this ignorance lie in observational difficulties associated with observing galaxies at extremely large distances. A new era for study of the first galaxies will open with the next generation of radio telescopes, which will enable astronomers to observe their influence on the surrounding universe. These radio telescopes will observe the 21 centimetre wavelength radiation from atomic hydrogen, in whose discovery Joseph Pawsey and his group played a role nearly 60 years ago. I will briefly describe the contribution that the joint Australian–US–Indian project known as the Murchison Widefield Array will make to this new science.