This month, Space Connect reported how researchers operating the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) in NSW used an athletics-style method to measure the speed of neutron star jets.

The international team timed the phenomenon like a “100-metre sprinter” to record that it travelled at 114,000 kilometres per second – one-third the speed of light.

In this episode, Tom Russell, who led the research, talks through the mysterious jets and how they developed a new way to track them.

Plus, he discusses why the ATCA telescope is still such a pioneering machine and what the future of the research holds.

We’re less than two months away from our annual Australian Space Summit and Exhibition.

The two-day event will be the biggest yet, featuring headliners including Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, and the commander overseeing the US Space Force’s Indo-Pacific team.

Hosting the event is Alan Duffy, a professor in astrophysics and pro-vice-chancellor of flagship initiatives at Swinburne University.

He joins the show this week to discuss his incredible career and the biggest issues in the sector this year.

An astronomer from Curtin University discovered 49 new galaxies from just three hours of operating the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa.

Dr Marcin Glowacki was leading an international collaboration aiming to study the star-forming gas in a single radio galaxy.

However, while the team didn’t discover the star-forming gas in the galaxy they were studying, they instead uncovered other galaxies when inspecting the data later.

This week, Dr Glowacki tells the story behind his incredible finding.