Astrophiz 61: Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker

Astrophiz 61: Dr. Natasha Hurley-Walker ~ Seeing the Universe in Radio Colour ~ on Soundcloud & iTunes

Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker is a GaLactic and Extragalactic MWA Survey Scientist who earned her PhD in Radio Astronomy at the University of Cambridge and is currently a Curtin Early Career Research Fellow who helped to commission the low-frequency SKA precursor radio telescope, the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), located in outback Western Australia.
Today in our feature interview we hear about some of her amazing research projects, including her all-sky survey of 300,000 galaxies and her Gleamoscope App. Last year she was named the WA Tall Poppy Scientist of the year, and right now we congratulate her for just being recognised as one of the 5 brightest science communicators in Australia for 2018.

Then Dr Ian “Astroblog’ Musgrave presents his regular segment ‘What’s Up Doc? where he tells us what's up in the evening, night and morning skies for the next two weeks, and in his tangent Ian explains how Earth, Mars, Titan and Comet 67P each has very different sands and yet very similar sand dunes.Dr Ian is a University pharmacology and toxicology lecturer, amateur astronomer and astrophotographer.

Follow @Astrophiz on Twitter, FB & Insta. Follow @ColourfulCosmos, @ICRAR and @ianfmusgrave on Twitter.
Get your Android Gleamoscope App from the Google Play Store.
See the Gleamoscope webpage on any device: gleamoscope.icrar.org

Then just put Astroblogger and Southern Skywatch into your search engine. 
Ian’s blogs come up #1 in searches.

Subscribe to our fabulous podcast on iTunes or Soundcloud or via your fav podcatcher

In the news: (via Nature, ASTRON and Australia’s science Channel)

Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity has passed its biggest test yet, when even phenomenally dense neutron stars fall like a feather

Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity has faced its most extreme test yet, with a neutron star and two white dwarfs found to orbit together in agreement with his predictions one thousand times more exacting than ever before.

A weak field test would see a feather and a hammer being dropped on the moon will both hit the surface at the same time, which is exactly what happened in the famous Apollo Experiment by Commander David Scott At the end of the last Apollo 15 moon walk,

But theorists asked would Einstein’s GR hold true in the most extreme conditions, in a strong gravitational field.

The researchers from ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy lead by by lead author Anne Archibald, and by Adam Deller from Swinburne OzGrav and 7 others from various research facilities around the world found the perfect naturally occurring system for a strong-field test,.

PSR J0337+1715 is a tight binary system of a neutron star and white dwarf orbiting each other every 1.6 days, with a more distant second white dwarf orbiting this binary in a 327-day orbit.