Space Weather with Radio Telescopes in Australia

Abstract

CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, operates a number of world-class radio astronomy observatories that are collectively known as the Australia Telescope National Facility (ATNF). The facility offers a powerful view of the southern hemisphere radio spectrum and supports world-leading research by Australian and international astronomers. Decades after the Culgoora Radioheliograph made fundamental discoveries about solar radio bursts, a new generation of radio telescopes in Australia are providing unique measurement capabilities to address outstanding questions in Heliophysics. Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara (“Sharing the Sky and Stars”), the CSIRO Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia, is home to the Murchison Widefield Array (operated by a consortium led by Curtin University), the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), and the future home of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA)-Low Telescope. Interplanetary scintillation (IPS) measurements by these radio telescope arrays will provide important observational constraints of the solar wind and interplanetary coronal mass ejections (ICMEs). This is enabled by simultaneous detections of a high density of scintillating sources over a wide field of view. Complementarily, Parkes Radio Telescope observations towards pulsars may provide density and magnetic field diagnostics of the corona and solar wind. In addition, radio observations toward exoplanet host stars give important constraints on the habitability of exoplanets. In this presentation, we will introduce the facilities, relevant radio astronomical diagnostics, early results, and plans for using the observations for data assimilation.