Future Students

Our there! Exhibition will highlight UWA's excellence in science to future students...

The success of the Beyond Fibres exhibition in February last year has inspired Out There! - a collaborative venture between the Faculty of Life and Physical Sciences, the School of Physics and the Spice program (UWA’s secondary teachers enrichment program), which will focus on the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope, one of the leading international science projects and the largest ground-based astronomy project in the world.

The SKA radio telescope (which will cost around A$1.8 billion) will be up to 50 times more sensitive than present-day instruments and will revolutionise our understanding of the origin and evolution of the Universe. The name of the exhibition, Out There!, refers to ‘out in space’ as well as the outback of Western Australia - one of the two short-listed locations for the SKA radio telescope (the other is Southern Africa) to be decided in 2011-12.

The Out There! exhibition, which will take place between March 10 – March 20 2008 in UWA’s Molecular and Chemical Sciences Building, aims to attract bright year ten students as well as interest from the larger community and will collaborate with various external groups: Scitech (and their partner Questacon), Astronomy WA, CSIRO and the office of the Chief Scientist, Professor Lyn Beazley.

The hands-on exhibition will feature:

• An operational radio telescope
• A scale model of the SKA radio telescope
• A demonstration of the science behind radio telescope by looking at interference patterns
• Interactive panorama of the proposed Murchison SKA site
• Looping images of different visualisations using different types of telescopes
• A timeline ribbon highlighting what we can currently see and how the SKA will allow the astronomers to “look back in time”
• And much more...

Visit www.science.uwa.edu.au and www.astro.uwa.edu.au, email jenni.wallis@uwa.edu.au or call Jenni on 08 6488 3263 for more information and school bookings.