- Date & Time
- November 4, 2025 (Tuesday) | 4:30 pm – 5:30 pm
- Venue
- CPD-3.04, 3/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU, Hong Kong
- Language
- English
- Speaker
- Professor Matthew BAILES
Shaw Prize Laureate in Astronomy 2023; Director of the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery
Abstract
This talk will demonstrate how astronomers have used radio telescopes to discover thousands of pulsars — the highly magnetised neutron stars left over when large stars explode at the end of their lives. Many of these pulsars have given us key insights into the intricacies of binary evolution and the many exotic systems they produce, the equation of state of nuclear matter, and the essential correctness of the General Theory of Relativity.
Novel educational virtual reality software will be used to illustrate the concepts being conveyed in his talk. The talk is designed to be conceptually rich yet understandable for anyone with a tertiary-level education.
Speaker Professor Matthew BAILES
Shaw Prize Laureate in Astronomy 2023; Director of the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery
Professor Matthew Bailes is the Director of the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery. He completed his PhD on the origin of pulsar velocities and he is a leading expert in pulsar discovery and precision timing. In 2023, he was awarded the Shaw Prize in Astronomy for his contributions towards the discovery of Fast Radio Bursts, millisecond-duration radio flashes from the other side of the Universe. He is a leader in the development of novel educational software for teaching astronomy concepts and will use Swinburne's Virtual Universe software to deliver this talk.