• Question: hey, what's the most significant development in your field of research and what would you aspire to achieve at the end of the year?

    Asked by RonWeasley11 to Rob, Jodi, George, Anna on 13 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Anna Scaife

      Anna Scaife answered on 13 Nov 2014:

      I think the most significant development in radio astronomy was probably the invention of “Earth Rotation Aperture Synthesis” – this is a technique where you use the rotation of the Earth to help you make better radio images. It meant that radio astronomers could start making pictures of the sky that looked as good as optical images and also had much better resolution, which meant they could see all the little details in things. One of the reasons I like it so much is also because the principles behind it are quite simple, which makes it an elegant solution.

      By the end of this year, I’d like to have finished the design for a new imaging system for the telescope we’re building at the moment. Maybe I’ll be inspired and create something as good as aperture synthesis!

    • Photo: Rob Appleyard

      Rob Appleyard answered on 13 Nov 2014:

      The most exciting future thing going on in computing is the possible development of a quantum computer. When a normal computer wants to solve a problem (like, say, breaking a code) it needs to go through all the possibilities until it finds the right one. That can take a while.

      When a quantum computer tries to solve the same problem, it doesn’t have to slowly check every possibility one at a time. Instead it can check every single possibility at once and pick the correct one. That makes it much, much faster to solve this kind of problem.

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