Astronomy in New Zealand

Radio Astronomy

Although New Zealand did not join Australia and Britain in pioneering the development of Radio Astronomy after World War 2, it can boast the world´s first woman radio astronomer, Elizabeth Alexander; the first post-graduate thesis in solar radio astronomy by Alan Maxwell; the first successful experiment establishing positions for radio sources that linked them to optical sources; and many world class radio astronomers including Gordon Stanley, Richard Manchester and Peter Napier.

More recently, advances in technology and supercomputing have given New Zealand the opportunity to join the "next generation" of radio astronomy. Using a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) which links several radio antennas to operate as one giant radio telescope, Sergei Gulyaev (Centre for Radiophysics and Space Research, Auckland University of Technology) has conducted VLBI experiments simultaneously with NZ, Australia and Japan. New Zealand is also part of the Australian bid for the Square Kilometre Array, a billion dollar international radio astronomy project.

In 1957 Robert Unwin developed a series of auroral radars operating from Bluff Hill. Almost fifty years later, the UNWIN array - part of an international auroral radar network, began operations in Southland.

In Canterbury Clif Ellyett´s and Colin Keay´s meteor research, begun in the 1950s, has been further developed by Jack Baggaley into one of the world´s leading meteor research programmes. (Link) Using the 26.2 MHz radar system AMOR sited at Birdlings Flat to measure the trajectories of dust particles entering the atmosphere at high speed, Baggaley has traced the geometry of the interplanetary dust cloud and identified a stream of particles from outside the solar system.

See also the paper A Brief History of Radio Astronomy in Aotearoa New Zealand [PDF 1.4 MB] by Marilyn Head.

Research Areas

• University of Canterbury and the Mount John Observatory 
• Radio Astronomy 
• The Planet Finders 
• Astrophysics 
• Cosmic Rays