Low frequency radio waves propagating in the interstellar medium are attenuated through absorption by thermal electrons, the optical depth being given by

where f is the radio frequency in MHz, the emission measure in cm-6 pc, and Te the electron temperature.

At the first A.S.A. meeting in 1966 radio astronomers knew of only the 21 cm line of hydrogen, a handful of hydroxyl lines and some radio recombination lines. The number of molecular lines now known in the radio spectrum is close to 220, so radio spectroscopy has become a fully fledged subject. I shall not discuss here the recent ultraviolet studies of H2, HD and CO molecules that have been reviewed by Spitzer and Jenkins (1975).

Solar flares for which protons of relativistic energies reach Earth are rare events compared with the number in which non-relativistic protons are produced. For instance, Shea and Smart (1978) have listed 139 proton events for the interval 1955-69 of which 17 were GLE’s (i.e. “ground level events” detected by the world network of cosmic ray neutron monitors). We have tentatively identified a further 11 GLE’s in the interval 1970-1977, of which 3 were in 1977 in the sunspot cycle which commenced about mid-1976 (cycle 21). Thus the average rate over the past two solar cycles has been a little over one per year.

In a technical sense radio astronomers do not use the radio spectrum; they are listeners only, and when the science began they had to listen in the quiet spaces between transmitting services. Radio astronomy was first recognized as a service by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in 1959, and the first frequency allocations were then made for it as a ‘passive’ service. In 1963 and 1971 further allocations and frequency protection were obtained at specialized World Administrative Radio Conferences (WARC). The allocations were required for two purposes: (i) to protect the frequencies of the most important spectral lines of atoms and molecules, and (ii) to provide a series of bands for continuum observations. The general protection so far provided has been vital to the growth of the science, and its continuation is of the highest priority to the future life and development of radio astronomy.

Observational and theoretical evidence points to the existence of an unusually high magnetic field on GX 1+4. The pulsar is thus an ideal laboratory for studying two-photon cyclotron emission, an important source of photons of frequency significantly less than the cyclotron frequency in X-ray pulsars. Low-frequency approximations to the two-photon cyclotron emission transition probabilities are derived. These are used to calculate the theoretical opening angle of the double-humped pulse shape predicted by the two-photon cyclotron emission model. The theoretical pulse shape, incorporating the effects of gravitational light bending, is compared with observations of GX 1+4. Observed light curves have opening angles consistent with the theoretically predicted maximum value.

New observations of the Magellanic Stream were made in December 1976 with the 64-m radio telescope at the Parkes Observatory of CSIRO. The ridges of H I emission of the Stream were traced from near its tip at ℓ = 90°, b = -40° to the Magellanic Clouds. This was the first time that the total length of the Stream was observed with the one system (only possible from the southern hemisphere) and with high spatial (15’ of arc) and velocity (4 km s-1) resolution. The results of this survey are presented in Figures 1 and 2 and the main features are listed below.

The Parkes interferometer consists of the 210-ft para-boloidal reflector of the ANRAO, and a 60-ft paraboloidal reflector mounted on rail tracks. These extend from 400 ft to 1400 ft from the 210-ft paraboloid and run both north-south and east-west. The baseline may be continuously varied during observation; receivers operating simultaneously at 468 and 1402 MHz enable the determination of complete visibility functions over the range 200λ to 2000λ.

A simple model is presented for electron acceleration in extragalactic radio sources with two hot spots. The effect of diffusive shock acceleration by multiple shocks is calculated numerically, with adiabatic and synchrotron losses included. It is found for the sources 3C 20 and 3C 268·4 that a consistent set of model parameters exists which reproduce the observations. The model fails to reproduce the observations for the source 3C 196.

The conventional method of measuring the radiation diagram of an antenna is to rotate it in the field produced by a fixed point source located in its Fraunhofer zone (Hollis et al. (1970)). With the very large antennas typically used in radio astronomy this presents difficulties. For example, to measure the 64 m telescope at ANRAO, Parkes at frequencies in the OH transition lines band (1.6-1.7 GHz), the source, to be located in the Fraunhofer zone, must be located at least 50 km away and then at a sufficiently high angle to allow measurements free from ground effects to be made. Clearly there are no terrestrial means to accomplish this.

Speckle interferometry (Labeyrie 1970, 1976) is one way of overcoming the blurring effect of the atmosphere in optical astronomy. When a short exposure is taken of an image, the seeing disc (typically several seconds of arc across) is seen to contain structure (speckles) down to the resolution limit of the telescope (0″.03 arc for the Anglo-Australian telescope). A second exposure 10 or so milliseconds later will show a different pattern of structure because the atmospheric irregularities will have changed. Multiple stars or source components within the same angular range of atmospheric irregularity (i.e. isoplanatic patch several seconds of arc across) will produce similar but displaced speckle patterns, and geometrical details of the components can be obtained from an autocorrelation analysis of the speckle pattern (Dainty 1975).

Coronae Austrinae is one of the few star formation areas lying well away from the galactic plane (l = 360°, b = −17°) and is visible predominantly from the Southern Hemisphere.

Infrared astronomical observations using ground-based equipment are confined to the few ‘windows’ or observation ports allowed by our absorbing atmosphere, the chief absorbing molecules being water vapour and CO2. The majority of such observations have been made using broadband filters defining the photometric J, H, K, L, M, N and O bands. Some narrow band and spectral work (essentially all photometric) has also been carried out, particularly in the 8-14 micron window. From a very few high altitude, cold, dry sites (where the integrated water vapour content of the atmosphere above the site is consistently less than 1mm), it is possible to make observations at 35 and 345 microns. In Australia, the integrated water vapour content above us is typically 15 mm, only rarely dropping below 7 mm, so that long wavelength IR measurements simply cannot be made using ground-based instruments in Australia. Water vapour is fortunately not well mixed in our atmosphere and by raising our observational platform to a high enough altitude we can in fact achieve quite high transmission for all wavelengths from 10 microns to 1 mm, where we link up with microwave observations using essentially radio techniques.

The rare carbonaceous chondrite which fell around the township of Murchison in northern Victoria, Australia, in 1969 has probably been the subject of more scientific publications than any other meteorite. The discovery of grains formed in a presolar environment and the abundance of organic molecules within the Murchison meteorite have facilitated studies of the formation of the Solar System, the development of stars and the origins of life.

Sheet-like clouds are common in turbulent gas and perhaps form via collisions between turbulent gas flows. Having examined the evolution of an isothermal shocked slab in an earlier contribution, in this work we follow the evolution of a sheet-like cloud confined by (thermal) pressure and gas in it is allowed to cool. The extant purpose of this endeavour is to study the early phases of core-formation. The observed evolution of this cloud supports the conjecture that molecular clouds themselves are three-phase media (comprising viz. a stable cold and warm medium, and a third thermally unstable medium), though it appears, clouds may evolve in this manner irrespective of whether they are gravitationally bound. We report, this sheet fragments initially due to the growth of the thermal instability (TI) and some fragments are elongated, filament-like. Subsequently, relatively large fragments become gravitationally unstable and sub-fragment into smaller cores. The formation of cores appears to be a three stage process: first, growth of the TI leads to rapid fragmentation of the slab; second, relatively small fragments acquire mass via gas-accretion and/or merger and third, sufficiently massive fragments become susceptible to the gravitational instability and sub-fragment to form smaller cores. We investigate typical properties of clumps (and smaller cores) resulting from this fragmentation process. Findings of this work support the suggestion that the weak velocity field usually observed in dense clumps and smaller cores is likely seeded by the growth of dynamic instabilities. Simulations were performed using the smooth particle hydrodynamics algorithm.

Evidence of TeV γ-ray emission has been found for only a handful of active galactic nuclei, with detailed investigations limited to the blazars Mrk 421 and Mrk 501. TeV γ-ray astronomy, as the highest energy band, provides important information that is hard to obtain from longer wavelength electromagnetic radiation. The current status of TeV γ-ray studies of active galactic nuclei is summarized and our understanding of the high energy phenomena taking place in active galactic nuclei is outlined, with the prospects for future TeV γ-ray observations also considered.

We analyse observations of a saddle-like structure in the corona above the western limb of the Sun on 2017 July 18. The structure was clearly outlined by coronal loops with typical coronal temperature no more than 1 MK. The dynamics of loops showed convergence towards the centre of the saddle in the vertical direction and divergence in the horizontal direction. The event is a clear example of smooth coronal magnetic field reconnection. No heating manifestations in the reconnection region or magnetically connected areas were observed. Potential magnetic field calculations, which use as the boundary condition the SDO/HMI magnetogram taken on July 14, showed the presence of a null point at the height of 122 arcsec above the photosphere just at the centre of the saddle structure. The shape of field lines fits the fan-spine magnetic configuration above NOAA 2666.

The transformation equations from BVRc to g′r′i′ magnitudes and vice versa for the giants were established from a sample of 80 stars collected from Soubiran et al. (2010) with confirmed surface gravity (2 ⩽ logg (cm s− 2) ⩽ 3) at effective temperatures 4000 < Teff(K) < 16000. The photometric observations, all sample stars at g′r′i′ and 65 of them at BVRc, were obtained at TÜBİTAK National Observatory (TUG) 1m (T100) telescope, on the Taurus Mountains in Turkey. The MV absolute magnitudes of the giant stars were estimated from the absolute magnitude-temperature data for the giant stars by Sung et al. (2013) using the Teff from the intrinsic colours considered in this study. The transformation equations could be considered to be valid through the ranges of the following magnitudes and colours involved: 7.10 < V0 < 14.50, 7.30 < g′0 < 14.85, − 0.20 < (B − V)0 < 1.41, − 0.11 < (V − Rc)0 < 0.73, − 0.42 < (g′ − r′)0 < 1.15, and − 0.37 < (r′ − i′)0 < 0.47 mag. The transformations were successfully applied to the synthetic BVRc data of 427 field giants in order to obtain the g′r′i′ magnitudes and colours. Comparisons of these data with the g′r′i′ observations of giants in this study show that the mean residuals and standard deviations lie within [− 0.010, 0.042] and [0.028, 0.068] mag, respectively.

We study a possibility to detect signatures of brown dwarf companions in a circumstellar disc based on spectral energy distributions. We present the results of spectral energy distribution simulations for a system with a 0.8 M⊙ central object and a companion with a mass of 30 MJ embedded in a typical protoplanetary disc. We use a solution to the one-dimensional radiative transfer equation to calculate the protoplanetary disc flux density and assume, that the companion moves along a circular orbit and clears a gap. The width of the gap is assumed to be the diameter of the brown dwarf Hill sphere. Our modelling shows that the presence of such a gap can initiate an additional minimum in the spectral energy distribution profile of a protoplanetary disc at λ = 10–100 μm. We found that it is possible to detect signatures of the companion when it is located within 10 AU, even when it is as small as 3 MJ. The spectral energy distribution of a protostellar disc with a massive fragment (of relatively cold temperature ~400 K) might have a similar double peaked profile to the spectral energy distribution of a more evolved disc that contains a gap.

If the background universe is observed through a significant amount of diffusely distributed foreground dust, then studies at optical wavelengths may be severely biased. Previous studies investigating the effects of foreground dust on background sources assumed dust to be ‘compactly’ distributed, i.e. on scales comparable to the visible extent of normal galaxies. We show, however, that diffuse dust is more effective at obscuring background sources. Galaxy clusters are a likely location for ‘large-scale’ diffusely distributed dust, and its effect on the counts of background sources is explored. We also explore the implications of a hypothesised diffuse intergalactic dust component uniformly distributed to high redshift with comoving mass density equal to that associated with local galaxies. In this case, we predict a deficit in background sources about three times greater than that found in previous studies.

We use a continuous wavelet transform to analyse the daily hemispheric sunspot area data from the Greenwich Royal Observatory during cycles 12–24 and then study the cause of the appearance or disappearance of the Rieger-type periodicity in the northern and southern hemispheres during a certain cycle. The Rieger-type periodicity in the northern and southern hemispheres should be developed independently in the two hemispheres. This periodicity in the northern hemisphere is generally anti-correlated with the long-term variations in the mean solar cycle strength of hemispheric activity, but the correlation of the two parameters in the southern hemisphere shows a weak correlation. The appearance or disappearance of Rieger-type periodicity in the northern and southern hemispheres during a certain solar cycle is not directly correlated with their corresponding hemispheric mean activity strength but should be related to the strength of the hemispheric activity during sunspot maximum times, which hints the Rieger-type periodicity is more related to temporal evolution of toroidal magnetic field. The Rieger-type periodicity in the two hemispheres disappears in those solar cycles with relatively weak hemispheric activity during sunspot maximum times. The reason for the disappearance of this periodicity may be due to the combined influence of relatively weak toroidal magnetic fields and torsional oscillations, the differential rotation parameters vary through the solar cycle and may not remain more or less unchanged during some time, which does not permit the strong growth of magnetic Rossby waves.