Mount Stromlo Observatory located just outside

Canberra Canberra ( ) is the capital city of Australia. Founded following the federation of the colonies of Australia as the seat of government for the new nation, it is Australia's largest inland city and the eighth-largest city overall. The ci ...

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...

, is part of the Research School of

Astronomy Astronomy () is a natural science that studies astronomical object, celestial objects and phenomena. It uses mathematics, physics, and chemistry in order to explain their origin and chronology of the Universe, evolution. Objects of interest ...

and

Astrophysics Astrophysics is a science that employs the methods and principles of physics and chemistry in the study of astronomical objects and phenomena. As one of the founders of the discipline said, Astrophysics "seeks to ascertain the nature of the h ...

at the

Australian National University The Australian National University (ANU) is a public research university located in Canberra, the capital of Australia. Its main campus in Acton encompasses seven teaching and research colleges, in addition to several national academies and ...

(ANU).

History

The

observatory An observatory is a location used for observing terrestrial, marine, or celestial events. Astronomy, climatology/meteorology, geophysical, oceanography and volcanology are examples of disciplines for which observatories have been constructed. His ...

was established in 1924 as The Commonwealth

Solar Observatory A solar observatory is an observatory that specializes in monitoring the Sun. As such, they usually have one or more solar telescopes. The Einstein Tower was a solar observatory in the Albert Einstein Science Park in Potsdam, Germany. Solar o ...

. The

Mount Stromlo Mount Stromlo (formerly Mount Strom ) is a mountain with an elevation of that is situated in the Australian Capital Territory, Australia. The mountain is most notable as the location of the Mount Stromlo Observatory. The mountain forms part ...

site had already been used for observations in the previous decade, a small observatory being established there by

Pietro Baracchi Pietro Paolo Giovanni Ernesto Baracchi (25 February 1851 – 23 July 1926) was an Italy, Italian-born astronomer, active in Australia and Government Astronomer of Victoria (Australia) 1900-15.J. L. Perdrix,Baracchi, Pietro Paolo Giovanni Ernesto ...

using the Oddie telescope located there in 1911. The dome built to house the Oddie telescope was the first Commonwealth building constructed in the newly established

Australian Capital Territory The Australian Capital Territory (commonly abbreviated as ACT), known as the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) until 1938, is a landlocked federal territory of Australia containing the national capital Canberra and some surrounding townships. ...

. In 1911 a delegation for an Australian Solar Observatory went to London seeking Commonwealth assistance. The League of the Empire sought subscriptions to assist raising funds. Survey work to determine the site's suitability had begun as soon as the idea of a new Capital was established. By 1909 the Australian Association for the Advancement of Science was assisted in this effort by

Hugh Mahon Hugh may refer to: *Hugh (given name) Noblemen and clergy French * Hugh the Great (died 956), Duke of the Franks * Hugh Magnus of France (1007–1025), co-King of France under his father, Robert II * Hugh, Duke of Alsace (died 895), modern-day ...

(Minister for Home Affairs). Until

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

, the observatory specialised in solar and atmospheric observations. During the war the workshops contributed to the war effort by producing

gun sight A sight is an aiming device used to assist in visually aligning ranged weapons, surveying instruments or optical illumination equipments with the intended target. Sights can be a simple set or system of physical markers that have to be aligne ...

s, and other optical equipment. After the war, the observatory shifted direction to stellar and galactic astronomy and was renamed The Commonwealth Observatory. Dr R. Wooley Director of the Observatory, worked to gain support for a larger reflector, arguing that the southern hemisphere should attempt to compete with the effectiveness of American telescopes. The ANU was established in 1946 in nearby Canberra and joint staff appointments and graduate studies were almost immediately undertaken. A formal amalgamation took place in 1957, with Mount Stromlo Observatory becoming part of the Department of Astronomy in the Research School of Physical Sciences at ANU, leading eventually to the formation of the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics in 1986. On 18 January 2003, the devastating Canberra firestorm hit Mount Stromlo (which was surrounded by a plantation pine forest), destroying five telescopes, workshops, seven homes, and the heritage-listed administration building. The only telescope to escape the fires was the 1886 15-centimetre Farnham telescope. Relics from the fire are preserved in the collection of the

National Museum of Australia The National Museum of Australia, in the national capital Canberra, preserves and interprets Australia's social history, exploring the key issues, people and events that have shaped the nation. It was formally established by the ''National Muse ...

. They include a melted telescope mirror and a piece of melted optical glass (flint). The latter has pieces of charcoal and wire fused into it from the fierce heat of the fire. Redevelopment is completed and the Observatory is now a major partner in the construction of the

Giant Magellan Telescope The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) is a ground-based extremely large telescope under construction, as part of the US Extremely Large Telescope Program (US-ELTP), . It will consist of seven 8.4 m (27.6 ft) diameter primary segments, that ...

. The current observatory director is Matthew Colless. The director's residence, destroyed in the 2003 fire, was rebuilt and opened to the public as a memorial in 2015.

Research

The

MACHO Machismo (; ; ; ) is the sense of being " manly" and self-reliant, a concept associated with "a strong sense of masculine pride: an exaggerated masculinity". Machismo is a term originating in the early 1930s and 1940s best defined as hav ...

project detected the first instance of the

gravitational lensing A gravitational lens is a distribution of matter (such as a galaxy cluster, cluster of galaxies) between a distant light source and an observer that is capable of bending the light from the source as the light travels toward the observer. This ...

of one star by another, known as

gravitational microlensing Gravitational microlensing is an astronomical phenomenon due to the gravitational lens effect. It can be used to detect objects that range from the mass of a planet to the mass of a star, regardless of the light they emit. Typically, astronomers ...

, in 1993 (Alcock et al. 1993; Paczynski 1996). This discovery was made by repeated imaging of the

Magellanic Cloud The Magellanic Clouds (''Magellanic system'' or ''Nubeculae Magellani'') are two irregular galaxy, irregular dwarf galaxy, dwarf galaxy morphological classification, galaxies in the southern celestial hemisphere. Orbiting the Milky Way galaxy, t ...

s with the refurbished 50-inch

Great Melbourne Telescope The Great Melbourne Telescope was built by Thomas Grubb in Dublin, Ireland in 1868, and installed at the Melbourne Observatory in Melbourne, Australia in 1869. In 1945 that Observatory closed and the telescope was sold and moved to the Mount Strom ...

which was equipped with a mosaic of eight 2048 by 2048 pixel CCDs. The camera was constructed by the Centre for Particle Astrophysics in California (CFPA), and at the time was the largest digital camera ever built (Frame & Faulkner 2003). Observations began in July 1992 and the project concluded in December 1999. In total, the MACHO project made over 200 billion stellar measurements, with the data processed both at the observatory and at the

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a federal research facility in Livermore, California, United States. The lab was originally established as the University of California Radiation Laboratory, Livermore Branch in 1952 in response ...

Brian Schmidt Brian Paul Schmidt (born 24 February 1967) is the Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University (ANU). He was previously a Distinguished Professor, Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow and astrophysicist at the University's Mo ...

organised an international collaboration, known as the High-z Supernova Search Team, to study the rate of change of the Cosmic Expansion using type Ia

supernova A supernova is a powerful and luminous explosion of a star. It has the plural form supernovae or supernovas, and is abbreviated SN or SNe. This transient astronomical event occurs during the last evolutionary stages of a massive star or when ...

e. In 1998, the team reach the conclusion that the cosmic expansion was

accelerating In mechanics, acceleration is the rate of change of the velocity of an object with respect to time. Accelerations are vector quantities (in that they have magnitude and direction). The orientation of an object's acceleration is given by th ...

, contrary to expectations. This universal acceleration implies the existence of

dark energy In physical cosmology and astronomy, dark energy is an unknown form of energy that affects the universe on the largest scales. The first observational evidence for its existence came from measurements of supernovas, which showed that the univer ...

and was named the top science breakthrough of 1998 by ''Science'' magazine. In 2011, Brian P. Schmidt shared the

Nobel Prize in Physics ) , image = Nobel Prize.png , alt = A golden medallion with an embossed image of a bearded man facing left in profile. To the left of the man is the text "ALFR•" then "NOBEL", and on the right, the text (smaller) "NAT•" then " ...

with

Saul Perlmutter Saul Perlmutter (born September 22, 1959) is a U.S. astrophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts & Sciences ...

and

Adam Riess Adam Guy Riess (born December 16, 1969) is an American astrophysicist and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute. He is known for his research in using supernovae as cosmologica ...

for such observations which provided evidence for the accelerating Universe. The

2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey In astronomy, the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey (Two-degree-Field Galaxy Redshift Survey), 2dF or 2dFGRS is a redshift survey conducted by the Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO) with the 3.9m Anglo-Australian Telescope between 1997 and 11 A ...

, co-led by Matthew Colless, undertook the largest galaxy redshift survey of its time, and was conducted at the

Anglo-Australian Observatory The Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO), formerly the Anglo-Australian Observatory, was an optical and near-infrared astronomy observatory with its headquarters in North Ryde in suburban Sydney, Australia. Originally funded jointly by the U ...

(AAO) with the 3.9m

Anglo-Australian Telescope The Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) is a 3.9-metre equatorially mounted telescope operated by the Australian Astronomical Observatory and situated at the Siding Spring Observatory, Australia, at an altitude of a little over 1,100 m. In 20 ...

between 1997 and 11 April 2002. In total, the survey measured more than 245,000 galaxies, providing, along with the

Sloan Digital Sky Survey The Sloan Digital Sky Survey or SDSS is a major multi-spectral imaging and spectroscopic redshift survey using a dedicated 2.5-m wide-angle optical telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, United States. The project began in 2000 a ...

, the definitive measurements of large scale structure in the low-redshift Universe.

Advanced instrumentation

The instrumentation group at Mount Stromlo Observatory has built two instruments for the Gemini Telescope. This includes the near infrared integral field spectrometer, NIFS, deployed on Gemini-North, and the adaptive optics imager for Gemini-South, GSAOI. NIFS, when nearly completed, was destroyed in the bushfires of 18 January 2003, and rebuilt. A new rapid survey telescope,

SkyMapper SkyMapper is a fully automated 1.35 m (4.4 ft) wide-angle optical telescope at Siding Spring Observatory in northern New South Wales, Australia. It is one of the telescopes of the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics of the ...

, was completed in 2014. SkyMapper resides at the ANU's other observatory ( Siding Spring) and can be operated remotely from Mount Stromlo. Mount Stromlo hosts a

DORIS (geodesy) DORIS is a French satellite system used for the orbit determination, determination of satellite orbits (e.g. TOPEX/Poseidon) and for position fixing, positioning. The name is an acronym of "Doppler Orbitography and Radiopositioning Integrated by ...

earth station A ground station, Earth station, or Earth terminal is a terrestrial radio station designed for extraplanetary telecommunication with spacecraft (constituting part of the ground segment of the spacecraft system), or reception of radio waves fro ...

installed by

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of Overseas France, overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, Pac ...

CNES The (CNES; French: ''Centre national d'études spatiales'') is the French government space agency (administratively, a "public administration with industrial and commercial purpose"). Its headquarters are located in central Paris and it is und ...

Location

Mount Stromlo Observatory is located at an altitude of 770 metres

above sea level Height above mean sea level is a measure of the vertical distance (height, elevation or altitude) of a location in reference to a historic mean sea level taken as a vertical datum. In geodesy, it is formalized as ''orthometric heights''. The comb ...

. Situated west of the centre of Canberra, near the district of

Weston Creek The District of Weston Creek is one of the original eighteen districts of the Australian Capital Territory used in land administration. The district is subdivided into divisions (suburbs), sections and blocks. The district of Weston Creek lies ...

. Canberra's main water supply treatment plant is located nearby.

Engineering heritage award

The observatory received an Engineering Heritage International Marker from

Engineers Australia Engineers Australia (EA) is an Australian professional body and not-for-profit organisation whose purpose is to advance the science and practice of engineering for the benefit of the community. Engineers Australia is Australia's recognized org ...

as part of its Engineering Heritage Recognition Program.

References

Bibliography

*''Alcock, C. et al. 1993, Nature, 365(6447), 621-623 *''Paczynski, B. 1996, Annu. Rev. Astro. Astrophys., 34(1), 419-459 *''Stromlo An Australian Observatory'' by Tom Frame and Don Faulkner, Allen and Unwin 1993,

External links

ANU WebsiteResearch School of Astronomy and Astrophysics
at the ANU
SkyMapper
Website.
Most important of all has been the scientific output of the Observatory
{{Authority control 1924 establishments in Australia Astronomical observatories in Australian Capital Territory Australian National University Buildings and structures in Canberra Recipients of Engineers Australia engineering heritage markers