"Exploring the Milky Way: the past, present & future"
Dr Naomi McClure-Griffiths
CEO Science Leader at the CSIRO Australia Telescope National Facility (ATNF)
Wednesday 1 October 2008, 6.30 for 7 pm
Conference Room 1, Darlington Centre, City Road
ABSTRACT
Dr McClure-Griffiths took us on a walk around the Milky Way revealing what we know about the structure of the Galaxy and how gas in the Galaxy leads to its evolution. Her talk focused on our current work on the interstellar gas and magnetic field in the Milky Way and what it is telling us about the complex interstellar ecosystem of the Milky Way. She also discussed the world's next-generation radio telescope, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), which will be one hundred times more powerful than any existing facility and which we hope to host in Australia. She concluded by discussing how the SKA will revolutionise our understanding of our home galaxy.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Dr Naomi McClure-Griffiths is a CEO Science Leader at the CSIRO Australia Telescope National Facility (ATNF), where she leads a research group with the aim of better understanding our own galaxy, the Milky Way. McClure-Griffiths has led two major surveys of the Milky Way including the Galactic All Sky-Survey, an on-going international project to produce an atlas of the hydrogen gas in the Milky Way. In 2006 she was the recipient of the Prime Minister's Malcolm McIntosh Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year for her discovery of a new spiral arm in the outer Milky Way.