We present analysis of the far ultraviolet (FUV) emission of sources in the central region of the Coma cluster ( $z=0.023$ ) using the data taken by the UVIT aboard the multi-wavelength satellite mission AstroSat. We find a good correlation between the UVIT FUV flux and the fluxes in both wavebands of the Galex mission, for the common sources. We detect stars and galaxies, amongst which the brightest ( $r \lesssim 17$ mag) galaxies in the field of view are mostly members of the Coma cluster. We also detect three quasars ( $z = 0.38, 0.51, 2.31$ ), one of which is likely the farthest object observed by the UVIT so far. In almost all the optical and UV colour-colour and colour-magnitude planes explored in this work, the Coma galaxies, other galaxies and bright stars could be separately identified, but the fainter stars and quasars often coincide with the faint galaxies. We have also investigated galaxies with unusual FUV morphology which are likely to be galaxies experiencing ram-pressure stripping in the cluster. Amongst others, two confirmed cluster members which were not investigated in the literature earlier, have been found to show unusual FUV emission. All the distorted sources are likely to have fallen into the cluster recently, and hence have not virialised yet. A subset of our data have optical spectroscopic information available from the archives. For these sources ( ${\sim} 10\%$ of the sample), we find that 17 galaxies identify as star-forming, 18 as composite and 13 as host galaxies for active galactic nuclei, respectively on the emission-line diagnostic diagram.

Odd Radio Circles (ORCs) are a class of low surface brightness, circular objects approximately one arcminute in diameter. ORCs were recently discovered in the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) data and subsequently confirmed with follow-up observations on other instruments, yet their origins remain uncertain. In this paper, we suggest that ORCs could be remnant lobes of powerful radio galaxies, re-energised by the passage of a shock. Using relativistic hydrodynamic simulations with synchrotron emission calculated in post-processing, we show that buoyant evolution of remnant radio lobes is alone too slow to produce the observed ORC morphology. However, the passage of a shock can produce both filled and edge-brightnened ORC-like morphologies for a wide variety of shock and observing orientations. Circular ORCs are predicted to have host galaxies near the geometric centre of the radio emission, consistent with observations of these objects. Significantly offset hosts are possible for elliptical ORCs, potentially causing challenges for accurate host galaxy identification. Observed ORC number counts are broadly consistent with a paradigm in which moderately powerful radio galaxies are their progenitors.

Recently, the OGLE team have reported a clear quasar microlensing signal in Q2237+0305. I have analyzed the microlens event of ‘image C’ by using their finely and densely sampled light curves. From light curve fitting, I unambiguously set the source size of ≤0.98 Einstein-Ring radius as a conservative limit. This limit corresponds to 2000 AU, if I adopt Mlens ~ 0.1M obtained by a recent statistical study of the mean mass of the lens object. This gives clear evidence for the existence of an accretion disk in the central region of the quasar.

The dry, cold, tenuous and stable air above the Antarctic Plateau provides superb conditions for the conduct of many classes of astronomical observations. We review in particular the rationale for undertaking near-IR, mm and particle astronomy in Antarctica, disciplines where telescopes are now operating at the US Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.

This paper outlines the extensive range of public programs offered by the Carter Observatory, including ‘public nights’, new planetarium and audio-visual shows, displays, the Carter Memorial Lectures, the annual Astronomical Handbook and other publications, a monthly newspaper column and three monthly radio programs. It also deals with the Observatory’s involvement in undergraduate and postgraduate astronomy at Victoria University of Wellington, various adult education training programs, ‘Overnight Extravaganzas’, holiday programs, and the recent development of the Education Service in response to the introduction of an astronomy curriculum into schools throughout New Zealand. Some possible future developments in the public astronomy and education areas are also discussed.

The 6 GHz transitions of the 2π3/2, J = 5/2 excited state of OH are present in emission in the direction of several OH-emission regions (Rickard et al. 1975; Knowles et al. 1976), and in absorption in compact thermal sources (Gardner and Whiteoak 1975). This has suggested that transitions in the next highest state near 13 GHz (J = 7/2) might also be widely observable. A single detection has already been reported in W3OH by Turner et al. (1970). In this paper we report the observation of narrow-band emission in several other sources.

Type I storms are the most frequently observed solar phenomena at metre and decimetre wavelengths. Since the first identification of the emission of this type with a large sunspot group a great many type I storms have been recorded with radio-spectrographs, polarimeters and interferometers (see, for example, Wild, Smerd and Weiss, Kundu, Wild). Nevertheless, we can offer no satisfactory answers to the most fundamental questions about type I storms: ‘What kind of disturbances supply energy to a localized coronal region to maintain the storm activity for up to several days?’; ‘What is the emission mechanism responsible for the peculiar features observed in type I storms?’.

Hodge 11 (= SL 868) is a red, globular-like cluster (V ≅ 12.1, B—V = 0.62), situated on the east side of the LMC about 5 kpc projected distance from its centre (Gascoigne 1966). It was included in a programme to study the chemical evolution of the LMC by determining ages and metal abundances for a number of its clusters. Figure 1 shows a preliminary colour-magnitude diagram, found from four AAT plates calibrated with the AAT two-channel photometer. The choice of the radius, 1′.37 (23 pc), within which the stars were measured, was guided by the surface photometry of the cluster described later (Figure 3). But while it makes the number of “clean” stars inside the radius rather small, those outside it are too unlikely to be cluster members. As yet the calibration extends only to V = 19.6, and the nature of the cluster cannot be determined unambiguously. But Figure 1 already shows an unusual feature, in the very blue colour of the group of stars at V ≅ 19, B—V = 0.60, which on the usual interpretation would point to a metal abundance possibly lower than any yet encountered.

As Voyager 1 sailed through Saturn’s system of moons and rings last November 1980 it revealed new worlds not seen by man before. For centuries, since Galileo’s first telescopic observations in 1610, the satellites of Saturn had been no more than pin points of light, whilst the structure of the rings was barely resolved beyond 3 principal bands. Yet, within the space of a few hours, that picture changed dramatically as the images of these objects grew through Voyager’s cameras from mere specks into full and wondrous worlds. These pictures contained features that were not only intricate and astonishing in detail but which were, in many cases, unfamiliar and unexpected. A composite view of the Saturnian system as seen by Voyager 1 appears in Figure 1. Saturn’s rings, once thought to be broad belts of particles spread uniformly thin through billions of years of evolution and interparticle collisions, were found to be divided into hundreds of individual ringlets (Figure 2). And Cassini’s Division, a region which had been previously thought to be empty because of a ‘sweeping’ influence of Mimas, was found to contain many ringlets itself! The appearance of light and dark radial spokes in the B ring, which rotated with a velocity contrary to the law expected of Keplerian orbits, was baffling. And the F ring (Figure 3) was found to contain knots, kinks and braids which probably indicated the presence of electro-magnetic forces as well as gravitational forces (Smith et al. 1981).

Relative efficiencies for the discovery of Earth-crossing asteroids (ECAs) are modelled for various telescopes at Siding Spring. It is found that the narrow-field instruments—the Anglo-Australian Telescope and the 40 in and 2·3m reflectors—are not competitive in this regard for present CCD imaging systems. The UK Schmidt Telescope (UKST), if used to take short-exposure stereo pairs of photographs, would be an effective search tool, outperforming all current systems apart from the Ground-based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance (GEODSS) systems now being implemented by the US Air Force for ECA searches. If a CCD mosaic were fitted to the UKST, its performance would far exceed that of any other device at Siding Spring, and it would produce ECA discoveries at a rate around 3–4 times as high as GEODSS, but at considerable expense. The most sophisticated search instrument currently in use is the University of Arizona’s Spacewatch telescope; a notable result found here is that even with its present CCD, the Automated Patrol Telescope (APT) of the University of New South Wales would be able to match or outperform Spacewatch for all ECA sizes, including ~10m objects, should this modelling be a reasonable representation of its real performance. In terms of cost-effectiveness and telescope availability, the conclusion arrived at herein is that the APT, equipped with small-pixel but large-format CCD chips of high quantum efficiency, would be an extremely effective ECA search instrument: if operated with 12 μm pixel chips covering a 4° × 4° field it might produce ECA discoveries at a rate well in excess of the combined rate for all current search programs.

We describe the design and deployment of GREENBURST, a commensal Fast Radio Burst (FRB) search system at the Green Bank Telescope. GREENBURST uses the dedicated L-band receiver tap to search over the 960–1 920 MHz frequency range for pulses with dispersion measures out to $10^4\ \rm{pc\,cm}^{-3}$ . Due to its unique design, GREENBURST is capable of conducting searches for FRBs when the L-band receiver is not being used for scheduled observing. This makes it a sensitive single pixel detector capable of reaching deeper in the radio sky. While single pulses from Galactic pulsars and rotating radio transients will be detectable in our observations, and will form part of the database we archive, the primary goal is to detect and study FRBs. Based on recent determinations of the all-sky rate, we predict that the system will detect approximately one FRB for every 2–3 months of continuous operation. The high sensitivity of GREENBURST means that it will also be able to probe the slope of the FRB fluence distribution, which is currently uncertain in this observing band.

Recent seeing measurements at the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) point towards the thermal characteristics of the telescope itself, in particular the temperature difference between the mirror and the dome air, as the most important factor degrading the seeing, more so than the temperature difference between the inside and outside air. We present the findings, propose clarifying experiments, and discuss possible remedies. We set the realistic target for the AAT to achieve median seeing of 1·5″ rather than the current 1·8″.

It is well established that late-type main-sequence (MS) stars display a relationship between X-ray activity and the Rossby number, Ro, the ratio of rotation period to the convective turnover time. This manifests itself as a saturated regime (where X-ray activity is constant) and an unsaturated regime (where X-ray activity anti-correlates with Rossby number). However, this relationship breaks down for the fastest rotators. We cross-correlated SuperWASP visually classified photometric light curves and All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae automatically classified photometric light curves with XMM-Newton X-ray observations to identify 3 178 stars displaying a photometrically defined rotational modulation in their light curve and corresponding X-ray observations. We fitted a power-law to characterise the rotation–activity relation of 900 MS stars. We identified that automatically classified rotationally modulated light curves are not as reliable as visually classified light curves for this work. We found a power-law index in the unsaturated regime of G- to M-type stars of $\beta=-1.84\,\pm\,0.18$ for the SuperWASP catalogue, in line with the canonical value of $\beta=-2$ . We find evidence of supersaturation in the fastest rotating K-type stars, with a power-law index of $\beta_{s}=1.42\pm0.26$ .

We present new results on the evolution and nucleosynthesis in rotating AGB stars. We analyse the role of the gradient of mean molecular weight in the mixing process and show that neglecting this component induces a potentially strong third dredge-up. We also quantify the impact of rotation on the structure and conclude that the effects of rotation (1) mainly concern the inner, fast rotating regions of the stars and (2) are relatively weak as long as rotational mixing does not induce a deep third dredge-up. We also focus our investigations on the s-process nucleosynthesis and show that rotational mixing tends to inhibit the production of s-elements. This results from the contamination of the 13C-rich layers responsible for the neutron production by the poisonous 14N. Our calculations also indicate that the distribution of s-process elements depends sensitively on the magnitude of the diffusion coefficient. These results suggest that rotational mixing is not the main mechanism responsible for the production of s-elements in AGB stars, but that it can influence, and in particular reduce, the final enrichment in s-elements.

Three different types of evidence are presented in favour of the hypothesis that the HII regions in disk galaxies with Hα luminosities greater than a critical value of 1038·6 erg s−1 are density-bounded, and that the escaping Lyman continuum photons from these are the principal ionising agents for the diffuse ISM in disk galaxies. This has important implications for the ionisation of the intergalactic medium, and for computed star formation rates in spirals.

The kinematic properties of tidal debris from an orbiting Galactic satellite is presented, on the assumption that its central part once contained the most massive Galactic globular cluster, ω Cen. We simulate dynamical evolution of a satellite galaxy that follows the present-day and likely past orbits of ω Cen, and analyse the kinematic nature of their tidal debris and randomly generated Galactic stars comprising spheroidal halo and flat disk components. It is found that the debris stars show a retrograde rotation at ∼–100 km s–1, which may accord with a recently discovered stellar stream at a radial velocity of ∼300 km s–1 towards the Galactic longitude of ∼270°. These stars also contribute, only in part, to a reported retrograde motion of the outer halo in the north Galactic pole direction, without significantly modifying local halo kinematics near the Sun. The prospects for future debris searches and the implications for the early evolution of the Galaxy are briefly presented.

We discuss our work on chemical abundance ratios of stars belonging to the thick-disk and thin-disk stellar populations. We discuss the selection of stars, and show that the two samples of stars have different [α/Fe] versus [Fe/H] behaviour.

The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is a low-frequency aperture array capable of high-time and frequency resolution astronomy applications such as pulsar studies. The large field-of-view of the MWA (hundreds of square degrees) can also be exploited to attain fast survey speeds for all-sky pulsar search applications, but to maximise sensitivity requires forming thousands of tied-array beams from each voltage-capture observation. The necessity of using calibration solutions that are separated from the target observation both temporally and spatially makes pulsar observations vulnerable to uncorrected, frequency-dependent positional offsets due to the ionosphere. These offsets may be large enough to move the source away from the centre of the tied-array beam, incurring sensitivity drops of ${\sim}30{-}50\%$ in Phase II extended array configuration. We analyse these offsets in pulsar observations and develop a method for mitigating them, improving both the source position accuracy and the sensitivity. This analysis prompted the development of a multi-pixel beamforming functionality that can generate dozens of tied-array beams simultaneously, which runs a factor of ten times faster compared to the original single-pixel version. This enhancement makes it feasible to observe multiple pulsars within the vast field of view of the MWA and supports the ongoing large-scale pulsar survey efforts with the MWA. We explore the extent to which ionospheric offset correction will be necessary for the MWA Phase III and the low-frequency square kilometre array (SKA-low).

We present high resolution spectra (0.7 Å/pix) of the GPS source 4C 12.50 with large spectral coverage (˜4500 Å) taken with the 4.2 m William Herschel Telescope, La Palma. The slit was aligned along PA 160° to include the nucleus and emission line region to the NW. An asymmetric halo extending 20 kpc NW and 12 kpc SE from the nucleus is clearly seen. At the position of the nucleus we observe unusually broad forbidden emission line components (broadest component: FWHM ˜ 2000 km s−1), blue shifted by up to 2000 km s−1 with respect to the halo of the galaxy and HI absorption. We interpret this as material in outflow. We measure E(B–V) = 1.44 for the broadest, most kinematically disturbed component, corresponding to an actual Hβ flux 130 times brighter than that measured. We calculate an upper limit for the mass of the line emitting gas of order 106 M⊙ for both the intermediate and broad components. Our results are consistent with 4C 12.50 being a young radio source.

The heights of solar radio sources at 1424 MHz and 696 MHz have been measured during the years 1965 and 1966. Solar activity at this time was near minimum. The number of radio sources appearing on the solar disk rarely exceeded three at any time and it thus was possible to resolve the majority of these with a high resolution grating interferometer. Many of the previous height measurements at these frequencies have been made near times of maximum solar activity and the confusion of sources within the beam has limited their accuracy. The number of sources studied here is quite considerably higher than in any previous investigation at these frequencies, and the period of observation has been continuous.