Insight
The software developers catching gravitational waves BY SEBASTIAN NEUWEILER (SKAO)
As several SKA pathfinder telescopes detected the strongest evidence yet for low-frequency gravitational waves (see page 24), in the inner east of Melbourne, Australia, a software company also had reason to celebrate. Fourier Space company is behind pulsar timing array software and instrumentation used by radio astronomy observatories globally, including Parkes’ multibeam pulsar signal processor and MeerKAT’s pulsar timing processor. Born from a desire to enable astronomy and space entities to solve their signal acquisition and processing challenges rapidly and effectively, Fourier Space CEO and co-founder Andrew Jameson said the skills and software libraries of the team had been honed over decades of instrumentation development for radio astronomy. “Not only do we want to work on the technical aspect, but we also care deeply on the scientific outcome, with everyone in the company having a very strong background in pulsar astronomy,” he said.
ABOVE: Fourier Space co-founders Andrew Jameson and Willem van Straten.
“A lot of the data that was recorded and collected as evidence of low-frequency gravitational waves was done with software our team had designed and contributed to. There’s a great sense of collective accomplishment, that you’re part of the engineering right up to discovery in science. “That’s exactly what we want to do in our involvement in the SKA endeavour: be able to build over the next several years the instrumentation that will lead to the next generation of breakthroughs and cutting-edge science.” The team has also designed the SKAO’s pulsar timing processor, which will be deployed at the Australian and South African sites to observe multiple pulsars in parallel. This will be accomplished by processing multiple phased-array beams, each pointing to a different spot on the sky, from the correlator beamformer of the central signal processor.
ABOVE: Both the MeerKAT telescope (left) and CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope, Murriyang (right) have made use of the pulsar timing software and instrumentation. Credit: SARAO & CSIRO 14
C O N TA C T
ISSUE
14
