MONDAY, June 22
Astronomy Tea Talk, 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM, 370 Cahill
"Under the Radar- The First Woman Radio Astronomer- Ruby Payne-Scott," Miller Goss, National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO).

Abstract:

Ruby Payne-Scott was born in New South Wales Australia in 1912. She graduated with a physics degree from the University of Sydney in 1933- the third woman to graduate with this degree in Sydney. She worked at an electronics company for a few years and then in 1941 started work at the newly established Division of Radiophysics, where secret radar research was carried out from 1939 to 1945. She worked on a number of radar projects and carried out the first Australian radio astronomy observations with Pawsey in 1944 at 11 cm. After the war she became the unofficial scientific leader of the 'Solar Noise Group ' under the leadership
of Taffy Bowen and Joe Pawsey. At the end of 1945 Payne-Scott and others detected solar
bursts at 200 MHz and published one of the more important early solar radio astronomy papers in February 1946 in the journal Nature. The giant sunspot of February of 1946 provided the opportunity for the rapid growth of radio astronomy using the sea cliff interferometer. Pawsey and Payne-Scott introduced the concept of aperture synthesis in their publication prepared in mid 1946, published in 1947 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. In the years up to 1951, she discovered Type I and Type III bursts and played a role in the detection of the 100 Billion Jansky 200 MHz burst detected on 8 March 1947. She planned and help construct the first swept lobe interferometer in 1948-1949; crude movies of the motions of solar bursts (Type IV) were made at a rate of 25 Hz. Payne-Scott's career was closely connected with that of John Bolton and Gordon Stanley. She battled continously for women's rights and had to leave the Commononwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization just before her son Peter was born in 1951. She never returned to scientific research and ended her career again as a school teacher. She died in 1981. She was a strong personality, an individual well known for her left wing views. We have obtained her ASIO (Australian Security and Intelligence Organization file) and discovered that she had been a member of the Communist Party of Australia. The
book by Goss and McGee will be launched at Sydney University in November 2009.