Australians (and John) Only Thread

[Spike]

25 minutes ago, Toinho said:

I don’t. It wouldn’t look appropriate with my profession. 

They are going to kill assange arent they

[CaaC (John)+]

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Nasa launches first rocket from Australian commercial spaceport

VIDEO

An unassuming patch of red dirt in remote Australia has made history as the site of Nasa's first rocket launch from a commercial spaceport outside the US.

The sub-orbital rocket blasted off from the tiny site early on Monday local time.

It will enable astrophysics studies that can only be undertaken in the Southern Hemisphere, Nasa says.

The launch was also the first in Australia in more than 25 years.

The rocket is Nasa's first of three to blast off from the newly constructed Arnhem Space Centre on the edge of the Northern Territory.

Scientists hope it will help them study the impact of a star's light on the habitability of nearby planets.

Onlookers who travelled to the remote site glimpsed the rocket for only about 10 seconds before it shot out of view.

"It was in the blink of an eye, but to me, it was like it was in slow motion because the whole area just lit up," Yirrkala School co-principal Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

"It went up, and then the sound, it was just like a rumbling boom, like nothing I've ever heard. And I just shook with amazement."

FULL REPORT

 

[CaaC (John)+]

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Ancient kangaroo species from Papua New Guinea jumps into view

The extinct animal is not as closely related to Australian roos as once thought.

Australia has very distinctive animals and plants. From the plethora of eucalypts and colourful parrots to the marsupials that bound and climb through the Aussie bush, it can appear like a different planet to those living in different parts of the world.

Well, almost. There is one place which shares a lot of the unique wildlife of the sunburnt country: Papua New Guinea.

Australia and PNG were once connected by the Sahul land bridge, submerged by what is now Torres Strait about 8,000 years ago. But before PNG was separated from the Australian mainland, the two lands shared very similar ecosystems. Even today, marsupial tree kangaroos and long-beaked echidnas roam in PNG’s forests.

FULL REPORT

 

[CaaC (John)+]

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New telescopes at Siding Spring to detect gravitational waves

Australia’s GOTO arrays will pinpoint ripples in spacetime.

A new international collaboration involving Monash University will place identical telescopes on opposite ends of the Earth to detect gravitational waves.

The Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO), led by the University of Warwick in the UK, will use its antipodal arrays to scour the sky in the search for the violent cosmic events which cause the ripples in spacetime known as gravitational waves.

These phenomena, predicted by Einstein over a century ago, were first detected by LIGO in 2015. Gravitational waves emerge when the universe’s densest objects – black holes, neutron stars, etc – collide, sending ripples through the fabric of space and time itself at the speed of light.

The telescopes, to be installed at the Siding Spring Observatory, NSW, are planned to be operational this year, in time for the next LIGO/Virgo run of gravitational wave observations in 2023.

There are 10 collaborators involved – six of them in the UK. UK Research and Innovation’s Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) has pledged $5.6 million for the project.

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Apart from Monash, Warwick and the five other UK institutions, the partnership includes the Canary Islands Institute of Astrophysics, the National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand, and Finland’s University of Turku.

“This is really encouraging from an international cooperation perspective that the UK is willing to support this project, with new telescopes to be built in Australia,” says Associate Professor Duncan Galloway, from the Monash University School of Physics and Astronomy.

Since 2015, gravitational waves have been detected a number of times. But observatories like LIGO only tell us when gravitational waves pass by Earth, making it very difficult to pinpoint the origin of these cosmic ripples.

Researchers hope that GOTO will bridge the gap between gravitational wave observations and the detection of electromagnetic sources.

“The new site gives us a massive improvement in our chance to observe the counterparts of gravitational wave detections,” Galloway says. “Detecting the optical counterparts promptly is a key factor in how much we can learn from gravitational wave detections. The first such event, GW170817, was identified in 11hours; but our GOTO network can be on sky and autonomously observing the field within minutes.”

The GOTO will act as a midway between detectors like LIGO and more conventional optical telescopes.

“There are fleets of telescopes all over the world available to look towards the skies when gravitational waves are detected, in order to find out more about the source,” says GOTO principal investigator and University of Warwick professor Danny Steeghs. “But as the gravitational wave detectors are not able to pinpoint where the ripples come from, these telescopes do not know where to look.”

After a successful test run of a prototype facility in the Spanish Canary Islands, at La Palma, phase two sees an expansion of the system.

La Palma is now host to two systems made up of eight individual 40cm telescopes. Their combined might allows them to sweep the visible sky every few nights.

But GOTO will double that capacity, with Monash University leading the preparation of the second identical site at the Siding Spring Observatory near Coonabarabran – known as the stargazing capital of Australia.

“The award of STFC funding was critical in allowing us to build GOTO, as it was always envisaged to be,” says Steeghs. “This gives us arrays of wide-field optical telescopes in at least two sites so that these could patrol and search the optical sky regularly and rapidly. This will allow GOTO to provide that much-needed link, to give the targets for bigger telescopes to point towards.”

The team believes GOTO will open the door to a new stage in gravitational wave astronomy. The project will provide scientists the opportunity to measure distances, characterise sources, study their evolution, and determine the environments in which they form.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/gravitational-waves-goto/

 

[Azeem]

On 14/06/2022 at 20:44, Aladdin said:

Why are mustaches popular in Australia ? David Warner looks like a porn star with a mustache 

Why is Australia non-existant in combat sports; boxing, MMA etc? A lot of Asian countries are better at it. 

[Bluewolf]

1 hour ago, Aladdin said:

Why is Australia non-existant in combat sports

Because after getting duffed up by a bunch of Emu's back in 1932 they realised they didn't have the physical or mental toughness required.. 

[Toinho]

3 hours ago, Bluewolf said:

Because after getting duffed up by a bunch of Emu's back in 1932 they realised they didn't have the physical or mental toughness required.. 

you lot were invaded, conquered and shagged more than pretty much anyone in Europe x 

[Bluewolf]

19 minutes ago, Toinho said:

you lot were invaded, conquered and shagged more than pretty much anyone in Europe x 

Very true and it's why we have the mental and physical strength to compete.. We fought against the following.... 

The Romans

The Vikings

The Germanic Tribes

Where as you lot took on and were soundly thrashed by these... 

 

[Toinho]

Heil Queen Saxon Coburg Gotha but tbh the Emus are stronger than those you listed. Haha 

58 minutes ago, Bluewolf said:

Very true and it's why we have the mental and physical strength to compete.. We fought against the following.... 

The Romans

The Vikings

The Germanic Tribes

Where as you lot took on and were soundly thrashed by these... 

 

 

[Spike]

On 10/07/2022 at 05:28, Bluewolf said:

Very true and it's why we have the mental and physical strength to compete.. We fought against the following.... 

The Romans

The Vikings

The Germanic Tribes

Where as you lot took on and were soundly thrashed by these... 

 

Fought, lost and colonised. No wonder The English had a hankerin for colonisation in classical era.

You'd have to go to the rural mountains of Wales to find a Briton without any Norman, Angle, Saxon, Roman, Dane, Norwegian, French, and whatever heritage in between. Their name would be Roary Lloplwhanynlown.

Edited July 11, 2022 by Spike

[Waylander]

@Bluewolf

Haha you forgot the Irish.

When the Romans left Irish tribes invaded Wales and Scotland, somehow they have gotten away with that one. 

[Bluewolf]

2 minutes ago, Waylander said:

@Bluewolf

Haha you forgot the Irish.

When the Romans left Irish tribes invaded Wales and Scotland, somehow they have gotten away with that one. 

My Father was Irish so not all invasions turn out too bad... 

[Toinho]

6 hours ago, Bluewolf said:

My Father was Irish so not all invasions turn out too bad... 

Irish when I went to England I invaded you. X 

[CaaC (John)+]

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The vulture has landed: Palaeontologists reclassify ancient Australian carrion bird

Former eagle fossil found to have characteristics associated with modern vultures

Australia officially has its first vulture or, at least, a very old, fossilised one after South Australian palaeontologists reclassified a specimen originally thought to have been an eagle.

Cryptogyps lacertosus (powerful hidden vulture) lived in Australia during the late Pleistocene, about 500 thousand to 50 thousand years ago.

But until now, its fossil has been classified as a prehistoric eagle.

Dr Ellen Mather,  from Flinders University in Adelaide, led the study, which has been published in Zootaxa.

She explains that comparing the fossilised tarsometatarsi – or the lower leg bone – to that of modern eagles and vultures enabled the reclassification.

“We determined this through getting the fossil specimens and comparing them to as many species of living eagles and vultures as we could,” Mather says.

“In this case, it turned out these fossils were more similar to a vulture than they were an eagle, and placing them in an evolutionary tree supported that conclusion.”

Reclassification over a century later

The first bone of Cryptogyps – a wing-bone fragment – was found in 1901 near Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre in the north-eastern outback of South Australia.  

British ornithologist Charles Walter de Vis in 1905 dubbed the fossil Taphaetus lacertosus (meaning powerful grave eagle), in the belief it was a predecessor of the wedge-tailed eagle (Aquila audax).

“And given that this was over 100 years ago, I don’t know that [de Vis] necessarily had all specimens on hand to do full-on comparisons,” says Mather.

“He was mostly comparing the fossils he had, to material from other birds in Australia at the time.”

The reclassification of the specimen as Cryptogyps is the result of Mather’s studies into describing fofossilised eagles and connecting them with their modern descendants.

She identified that the fossil had less pronounced phalanges – or toe bones – than would be expected from ancestors of today’s eagles.

That lends itself to an animal less inclined to attack live prey, and more likely to peck at a dead carcass.

“On the eagle there are some large phalanges on each of the trochlea – the part where the toes articulate to – and they indicate that there would be musculature there,” she says.

“In an eagle these are quite well developed … in order to give them the strength to grab on to and pierce their talons through prey.

“In this fossil, however, the phalanges are really reduced, which indicates that this comes from a bird that doesn’t have that kind of muscular power.

“That’s consistent with what we see in other vultures today.”

The loss of vulture would have left a gap

Vultures are a bit like the garbageman of the animal world, cleaning up animal carcasses and lowering the risk of diseases spreading.

The disappearance of Cryptogyps after Australia’s Pleistocene would therefore remove an important carrion consumer from the continent’s ancient ecosystems.

This would have resulted in a major upheaval, as other organisms “scrambled to fill in its niche”.

“The extinction of vultures in Australia has major ecological implications,” says Mather. “The loss of Cryptogyps could have caused a drastic upheaval in ecosystems.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/palaeontology/the-vulture-has-landed/

 

 

Edited July 20, 2022 by CaaC (John)
Spacing correction

[CaaC (John)+]

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New Australian telescope, the first of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere, will study the evolution of galaxies

The telescope is a partnership between Macquarie University and Canon Australia.

Macquarie University and camera manufacturer Canon are teaming up to deliver a telescope designed to hunt for and study distant galaxies and other astronomical objects. The aim is to learn more about the evolution of galaxies like our own Milky Way.

Given that the task is to hunt for galaxies in the dead of night, it’s no surprise the project is named after an Aussie arachnid icon.

Called the Huntsman Telescope, the instrument is being prepared at the Siding Spring Observatory near Coonabarabran, 180 km west of Tamworth in north west New South Wales. The new telescope is set to commence observations on October 1, this year as part of the StarFest event hosted by Siding Spring every year.

The telescope will be the first of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere, sweeping the southern sky for light in the visible wavelength part of the spectrum from faint and far-off objects to learn about how galaxies form, grow, engage with other structures, and what happens when galaxies collide.

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Huntsman’s Principal Investigator is Dr Lee Spitler, an astrophysicist from Australia’s Macquarie University. Spitler says the telescope’s work could be key to understanding the fate of our own home galaxy. The Milky Way is on a collision course with its nearest neighbour, the Andromeda Galaxy, a galactic pileup set to occur in about 4.5 billion years.

“The Huntsman Telescope is pioneering the way in which we view our Southern skies by capturing images of the faintest galaxy structures that conventional telescopes simply couldn’t,” says Spitler. “The ability to detect the faintest and smallest galaxies in the universe will help us understand the potential fate of the Milky Way in the far distant future.”

Huntsman will make use of an array of ten commercially available Canon EF 400mm f/2.8 L IS II super-telephoto lenses usually used by professional sports or wildlife photographers. The array is inspired by the Dragonfly Telephoto Array, run by the University of Toronto in Canada, which is in turn inspired by the tessellated eyes of its namesake, the humble dragonfly. The Dragonfly Telephoto Array also uses Canon telephoto lenses.

The L-series of Canon lenses use a coating to deal with reflections with structures on the nanometre scale (smaller than the wavelength of the light being observed). These structures diffuse the light just enough to reduce reflections. This contrasts with conventional mirror telescopes which are polished – the polishing process is not perfect and can introduce subtle errors into observations.

Huntsman’s lenses are also widefield, giving the telescope redundancy in its sight to improve accuracy.

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“Canon is proud that our EF-lenses will play a role in helping Australian scientists tackle some of the most critical questions in astronomy today,” says Kotaro Fukushima, Managing Director of Canon Oceania.

One of Huntsman’s five student technical and science team members, PhD candidate Sarah Caddy, says the telescope’s advanced technology will help answer questions beyond even galaxy formation.

“The Huntsman’s new suite of powerful computers enable each lens or ‘eye’ of the Huntsman to operate independently of each other. This will allow the telescope to autonomously detect ultra-fast transient events like stellar flares from distant stars, or even more exotic phenomenon like aiding the search for the origin of fast radio bursts that continue to elude astronomers,” says Caddy.

StarFest is on at Coonabarabran on September 30 and October 1.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/huntsman-galaxy-telescope/

 

Edited July 26, 2022 by CaaC (John)

[Spike]

@Toinho

@Devil-Dick Willie

@Harry

So we are slowly but surely arranging things to immigrate to Australia. Ideally it’d be ASAP but with the housing market it’s all about patience, even though my homesickness is slowly killing me. I am kind of out of the loop having not rented since 2014, so any of your experiences with bank loans, mortgages, renting, would be really helpful for me. Especially since the three of you live in very different areas of the country, and I’m not opposed to living in any of them, although the Brisbane area is ideal because that’s closest to home, and I am very much a dyed in the wool Qlder.

 

[Spike]

I also don’t really have much of a luxury living with family, as they all live on one remote country town, it does make everything a lot more complex as I am not stated to inherit any particularly relevant real estate.

[Devil-Dick Willie]

I have been renting for 5 years + now, what did you want to know?

[Spike]

1 hour ago, Devil-Dick Willie said:

I have been renting for 5 years + now, what did you want to know?

Typical costs, agreements, that sort of thing. I wouldn't know how much rent would cost, or what the typical house looks like in Illawarra.

[Devil-Dick Willie]

1 hour ago, Spike said:

Typical costs, agreements, that sort of thing. I wouldn't know how much rent would cost, or what the typical house looks like in Illawarra.

I live in a 3 bedder, pay 180 a week with internet water and gas covered, but paying electricity separate. You pay 4 weeks rent as a bond.

I'd say rent here unless you're in a bougie part of town is typically gonna be 180-240 a week per head. 
 

[Spike]

18 minutes ago, Devil-Dick Willie said:

I live in a 3 bedder, pay 180 a week with internet water and gas covered, but paying electricity separate. You pay 4 weeks rent as a bond.

I'd say rent here unless you're in a bougie part of town is typically gonna be 180-240 a week per head. 
 

What’s wrong with the Gong?

[Devil-Dick Willie]

3 minutes ago, Spike said:

What’s wrong with the Gong?

It's like a mini sydney. Lots of different suburbs with different socioeconomic levels. The closer to town or uni are generally more expensive suburbs, and obviously there are some dumps, but there are a few 'mixed' suburbs now where you can grab a bargain for the lifestyle you get. Bellambi and Unanderra would fit into that mold.    

As for Wollongong itself, it's a bit boring, but there's beaches, babes, a uni (so the place isn't entirely a nest of tradies and crackheads) and some nice mountains to bushwalk, and it's a 30/40 minute drive from south sydney, just over an hour into Sydney city, 2 and a bit hours to Canberra. 

[Spike]

5 minutes ago, Devil-Dick Willie said:

It's like a mini sydney. Lots of different suburbs with different socioeconomic levels. The closer to town or uni are generally more expensive suburbs, and obviously there are some dumps, but there are a few 'mixed' suburbs now where you can grab a bargain for the lifestyle you get. Bellambi and Unanderra would fit into that mold.    

As for Wollongong itself, it's a bit boring, but there's beaches, babes, a uni (so the place isn't entirely a nest of tradies and crackheads) and some nice mountains to bushwalk, and it's a 30/40 minute drive from south sydney, just over an hour into Sydney city, 2 and a bit hours to Canberra. 

I’m from a town of 1,200 and currently living in  the metro of city that literally has gangs murdering each other daily. I think whatever Wollongong offers could please me. Though I suppose the industry I am in probably has little presence there.

[Devil-Dick Willie]

1 minute ago, Spike said:

I’m from a town of 1,200 and currently living in  the metro of city that literally has gangs murdering each other daily. I think whatever Wollongong offers could please me. Though I suppose the industry I am in probably has little presence there.

What industry? The starbucks industry 

[Spike]

1 minute ago, Devil-Dick Willie said:

What industry? The starbucks industry 

I haven’t done that in over a year. I work in brewing beer.