[LINK] O/t: Ruby Payne-Scott — Radar Brilliance

[Stephen Loosley]

<newsletters at scientificamerican.com>

Today in Science

February 9, 2023: The female physicist who launched the field of radio astronomy — Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor


Radar Brilliance

This is the little-known story of Ruby Payne-Scott. An engineer, physicist and math whiz, during the second World War she worked in Australia on radar equipment to detect enemy aircraft.

After the war, Payne-Scott went to the cliffs at Dover Heights in Sidney before dawn on a February morning in 1946. At sunrise she aimed her radar detector at the sun and registered “fringes”--the sign of two overlapping radio waves, one from the sun, one from the radio wave bouncing off the ocean.

How this matters:  Using mathematical calculations to separate the overlapping radio waves, Payne-Scott successfully triangulated their precise point of origin: a sunspot on the sun’s surface.

This method is called interferometry and is still used today by radio telescopes that look out into the universe. Radio astronomers have captured the light of the early universe, jets of radiation spewing off supermassive black holes, nebulas where stars are born, and dead stars that flash in radio light.

It was the dawn of radio astronomy. Payne-Scott left research after only six years to raise children (Australian policy at the time did not encourage married women or mothers to work).

What the experts say: Radio astronomy provided a new window on the universe, says Miller Goss, a radio astronomer. “It turned out that the universe looked a lot different in the radio than the optical astronomers had known ever since Galileo in the 17th century.”

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