History of Astronomy in Australia: Big-Impact Astronomy from World War II until the Lunar Landing (1945-1969)

Abstract

Radio astronomy commenced in earnest after World War II, with Australia keenly engaged through the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. At this juncture, Australia's Commonwealth Solar Observatory expanded its portfolio from primarily studying solar phenomena to conducting stellar and extragalactic research. Subsequently, in the 1950s and 1960s, astronomy gradually became taught and researched in Australian universities. However, most scientific publications from this era of growth and discovery have no country of affiliation in their header information, making it hard to find the Australian astronomy articles from this period. In 2014, we used the then-new Astrophysics Data System (ADS) tool Bumblebee to overcome this challenge and track down the Australian-led astronomy papers published during the quarter of a century after World War II, from 1945 until the lunar landing in 1969. This required knowledge of the research centres and facilities operating at the time, which are briefly summarised herein. Based on citation counts -- an objective, universally-used measure of scientific impact -- we report on the Australian astronomy articles which had the biggest impact. We have identified the top-ten most-cited papers, and thus also their area of research, from five consecutive time-intervals across that blossoming quarter-century of astronomy. Moreover, we have invested a substantial amount of time researching and providing a small tribute to each of the 62 scientists involved, including several trail-blazing women. Furthermore, we provide an extensive list of references and point out many interesting historical connections and anecdotes.

arXiv commentTo appear in "A Trip across the Universe: Our Present Knowledge and Future Perspectives", Emilio Elizalde (Ed.), Galaxies, Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI)

References in corpus (43)

• Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger
• The Murchison Widefield Array: the Square Kilometre Array Precursor at low radio frequencies
• The Five-Hundred-Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) Project
• The international pulsar timing array project: using pulsars as a gravitational wave detector
• A concise reference to (projected) Sersic R^{1/n} quantities, including Concentration, Profile Slopes, Petrosian indices, and Kron Magnitudes
• The HST Key Project on the Extragalactic Distance Scale. XXVIII. Combining the Constraints on the Hubble Constant
• SkyMapper and the Southern Sky Survey
• The Parkes Pulsar Timing Array Project
• Gravitational waves from binary supermassive black holes missing in pulsar observations
• EMU: Evolutionary Map of the Universe
• SkyMapper Southern Survey: First Data Release (DR1)
• Science with the Murchison Widefield Array
• A real-time fast radio burst: polarization detection and multiwavelength follow-up
• The 6-GHz methanol multibeam maser catalogue I: Galactic Centre region, longitudes 345 to 6
• Science With The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder
• The Phase II Murchison Widefield Array: Design Overview
• HATSouth: a global network of fully automated identical wide-field telescopes
• Follow up of GW170817 and its electromagnetic counterpart by Australian-led observing programs
• The SUrvey for Pulsars and Extragalactic Radio Bursts II: New FRB discoveries and their follow-up
• Detection of Sub-TeV Gamma-Rays from the Galactic Center Direction by CANGAROO-II
• 12.2-GHz methanol masers associated with 1.2-mm dust clumps: Quantifying high-mass star formation evolutionary schemes
• The Dawes Review 8: Measuring the Stellar Initial Mass Function
• VAST: An ASKAP Survey for Variables and Slow Transients
• The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: Observations of 1327 Nearby Stars over 1.10-3.45 GHz
• Galaxy bulges and their massive black holes: a review
• GASKAP -- The Galactic ASKAP Survey
• Emerging spatial curvature can resolve the tension between high-redshift CMB and low-redshift distance ladder measurements of the Hubble constant
• The UTMOST: A hybrid digital signal processor transforms the MOST
• Halo Substructure Boosts to the Signatures of Dark Matter Annihilation
• A measure of total research impact independent of time and discipline
• From primordial seed magnetic fields to the galactic dynamo
• Source counts and confusion at 72-231 MHz in the MWA GLEAM survey
• The POlarised GLEAM Survey (POGS) I: First Results from a Low-Frequency Radio Linear Polarisation Survey of the Southern Sky
• Pulsars probe the low-frequency gravitational sky: Pulsar Timing Arrays basics and recent results
• Gridded and direct Epoch of Reionisation bispectrum estimates using the Murchison Widefield Array
• The Zadko Telescope: A Southern Hemisphere Telescope for Optical Transient Searches, Multi-Messenger Astronomy and Education
• MWA Tied-Array Processing I: Calibration and Beamformation
• Interplanetary Scintillation with the Murchison Widefield Array V: An All-sky Survey of Compact Sources using a Modern Low-frequency Radio Telescope
• Early Australian Optical and Radio Observations of Centaurus A
• ASKAP Commissioning Observations of the GAMA 23 Field
• An optimised gravitational wave follow-up strategy with the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder
• Nuclear Astrophysics Before 1957
• Extragalactic Star Clusters: Speculations on the Future