The Australian Research Council (ARC) has announced funding of $20.6 million over seven years for the ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO).
CAASTRO's mission will be to develop leading-edge expertise in the area of wide-field, survey astronomy, building on the already world-class capabilities of the Australian and international collaborators. In doing so it expects to solve fundamental data processing problems that can potentially be applied to communications, medical imaging and remote sensing.
CAASTRO's first Director will be Professor Bryan Gaensler of the University of Sydney, and the University of Sydney will be the administering organisation.
|
The collaborating and partner organisations are:
The University of Western Australia
The University of Melbourne
Swinburne University of Technology
The Australian National University
Curtin University of Technology
CSIRO
Australian Astronomical Observatory
Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy
Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics |
California Institute of Technology
University of Oxford
Durham University
University of Arizona
University of Toronto
Laboratoire de Physique Nucleaire et de Hautes Energies
iVEC
National Computational Infrastructure |
All CAASTRO activities will have a strong focus on training the next generation of scientists, providing a legacy extending well beyond the Centre’s lifetime.
Students that CAASTRO mentors will lead scientific discoveries made with future wide-field facilities, including the ultimate all-sky telescope, the €1.5 billion Square Kilometre Array.
The funding for CAASTRO formed part of the 2011 funding round for ARC Centres of Excellence.
For more information on CAASTRO, please visit http://www.caastro.org.au or http://www.arc.gov.au/ncgp/ce/astrophysics.htm.
Image: Artist’s impression of a complete ASKAP at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO). Credit: Swinburne Astronomy Productions, design data provided by CSIRO.