Most if not all metre-wave Type III bursts appear to be associated with solar active regions (e.g. Duncan 1977). There is a well-known association of Type III bursts and flares within a few minutes of the onset of the brightenings seen in Hα (Wild et al. 1954). Early descriptions of these observations were given by Malville (1961) (or see Kundu (1965) for review). More recently Jackson et al. (1978) have reported the occurrence of a broad maximum of Type III bursts 10 to 5 h prior to mass ejection transients seen by the white light coronagraph on Skylab.

The 3 mm radio continuum emission from active galaxies consists of three components:

1. (1) Synchrotron emission from the active galactic nucleus (AGN), which is over 1 Jy in 3C273 but which is not significant in most of the types of galaxy considered here.

2. (2) Free–free emission from H II regions. The flux of this in a starburst galaxy is typically of the order of 10 mJy and could be imaged with a 3 mm-capable Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA).

3. (3) Emission from the tail of the 50–100 K black-body spectrum of the dust. For example, the dust in Arp 220 (redshift of 0·02) at a temperature of 50 K has a flux of 30 mJy at 3 mm. Interestingly, this flux does not decrease substantially with redshift, as the decrease in brightness is compensated for by the redshifting of the steep edge of the blackbody curve, and so infrared-bright galaxies can be studied up to high redshifts with existing instruments.

Relative efficiencies for the discovery of Earth-crossing asteroids (ECAs) are modelled for various telescopes at Siding Spring. It is found that the narrow-field instruments—the Anglo-Australian Telescope and the 40 in and 2·3m reflectors—are not competitive in this regard for present CCD imaging systems. The UK Schmidt Telescope (UKST), if used to take short-exposure stereo pairs of photographs, would be an effective search tool, outperforming all current systems apart from the Ground-based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance (GEODSS) systems now being implemented by the US Air Force for ECA searches. If a CCD mosaic were fitted to the UKST, its performance would far exceed that of any other device at Siding Spring, and it would produce ECA discoveries at a rate around 3–4 times as high as GEODSS, but at considerable expense. The most sophisticated search instrument currently in use is the University of Arizona’s Spacewatch telescope; a notable result found here is that even with its present CCD, the Automated Patrol Telescope (APT) of the University of New South Wales would be able to match or outperform Spacewatch for all ECA sizes, including ~10m objects, should this modelling be a reasonable representation of its real performance. In terms of cost-effectiveness and telescope availability, the conclusion arrived at herein is that the APT, equipped with small-pixel but large-format CCD chips of high quantum efficiency, would be an extremely effective ECA search instrument: if operated with 12 μm pixel chips covering a 4° × 4° field it might produce ECA discoveries at a rate well in excess of the combined rate for all current search programs.

Conditions on the high Antarctic Plateau would appear to be extremely favourable for a wide range of astronomical research. Before a decision can be made on constructing an observatory, data are required on site conditions at the most promising locations. To enable these data to be collected, a Lockheed Automated Geophysical Observatory is being purchased. This facility will be fitted with a suite of astronomical site-testing instruments, and deployed to several sites on the Antarctic Plateau. This program will allow a definitive assessment of the site conditions to be made by the end of this century.

As part of a program to investigate southern extragalactic radio sources, the Molonglo Reference Catalogue source 1452-517 has been observed with, the MOST and FST. It was found to have a compact core and broad lobes giving an angular size of around 20 arcmin. Despite the low galactic latitude (b = 6°) a probable identification has been made with a magnitude 18 galaxy indicating a physical size of over 1 Mpc.

Local large scale structure is best studied using statistically complete samples which cover the entire sky, and for which full redshift information is available. The optical galaxy redshift surveys which have been made to date involve many thousands of objects but cover only limited parts of the sky, and so provide only a fragmented picture of local large scale structure. Complete samples of radio and X-ray galaxies are available, however, with large sky coverage. While the number of objects is small, they may still suffice to define the dominant local structures, particularly as they may preferentially sample the deeper gravitational potentials and so provide a more efficient tracer of dominant structure.

Last year I described pairs of spherical mirrors that remove the coma and astigmatism in the image formed by a paraboloid mirror and leave the spherical aberration corrected. The investigation can be extended to deal with other shapes of primary mirror, for example the hyperboloid primary of the Anglo-Australian Telescope. The algebraic analysis becomes more complicated than for a paraboloid; but it still has the feature that at an early stage a cubic equation has to be solved, each real root of which gives rise to a second cubic. Thus in principle the mathematics could lead to nine solutions. However, it again turns out that not all the roots are real; and even for the real roots not all the solutions are physically useful, because in some cases the final image is virtual, and in others the tertiary mirror lies behind the secondary where light can not reach it. When the primary is a paraboloid, there are three useable solutions all with the property that the field corrector (consisting of the pair of spherical mirrors) can simply be scaled up or down at the user’s pleasure according to the diameter of the field he wishes to photograph. When the primary is of any other shape this is no longer possible.

Some while ago (Prentice 1973a) I demonstrated that if the present Sun were to possess a small burnt out central core of mass 2-3% M ⊙ its neutrino flux would be a factor 10 or so smaller than that of conventional homogeneously evolved solar models. It was not, however, conclusively shown what conditions might lead to the formation of such a core or indeed whether a burnt out core could be attained after 4.7 × 109 yr. of nuclear evolution. In this connection Demarque et al. (1973) has considered the evolution of an initially inhomogeneous model consisting of a hydrogen free core surrounded by a homogeneous envelope.

Ground-based gamma-ray astronomy has slowly developed over the past quarter of a century to a position now where a number of sources are known to produce gamma-rays in the energy range 1011eV to 1018eV. The observations are difficult, with exceptional signal to noise problems, but improved techniques are now allowing observers to proceed with confidence. In this paper the physical bases of the observations are emphasised to show the important issues in the field and the present state of the observations is indicated.

The cataclysmic variables are close binary systems consisting of a late type star and a collapsed star, usually a white dwarf, undergoing mass exchange. According to the standard model, the late type star (the secondary) fills its Roche lobe and material escaping from the inner Lagrangian point is transferred to the primary by means of a mass transfer stream and an accretion disc. The spectroscopic and photometric properties of most cataclysmic variables can be understood in terms of radiation from the various components of such a system, with the accretion disc usually dominating in the optical region (see Warner (1976) for a review). However, recently a new class of cataclysmic variables has been discovered with distinctive optical properties that are inexplicable in terms of the standard model. These systems known as the AM Herculis type variables have provided the first direct evidence for the presence of strong magnetic fields in the white dwarfs of some cataclysmic variables. We present here a review of some of the important properties of these variables with emphasis on the unique system VV Puppis which has provided the first unequivocal evidence for high harmonic cyclotron radiation from white dwarfs.

Ammonia was the first interstellar molecule with more than two atoms to be discovered (Cheung et al. 1968). Since that time it has been observed in many HII regions and dark clouds (Mayer et al. 1973; Morris et al. 1973; Cheung et al. 1973; Kaifu et al. 1975). The molecule has a rich rotation-inversion spectrum with about 10 transitions in the range 23-25 GHz. Each line has hyperfine structure which permits, in principle, the determination of optical depths, filling factors and excitation. Unfortunately line brightness temperatures are low (<1 K) so that a low-noise receiving system and long integration times are required to exploit these possibilities.

Astronomical observations from space-borne instruments are carried out in India in the areas of infrared, X-ray and gamma-ray astronomy. This paper briefly describes the facilities available in India for conducting experiments in space astronomy using balloons, rockets and satellites. It briefly reviews the important results obtained by Indian astronomers from observations made in India with the balloon, rocket and satellite experiments. The present status of research in different disciplines of space astronomy is discussed.

The multi-object spectroscopic facility FOCAP at the Anglo-Australian Telescope has been used to obtain spectra centred at the Ca II IR triplet of 14 stars in the field of the Sextans dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxy. This satellite of our own Galaxy was recently discovered by Irwin et al. (1990) from APM measures of UK Schmidt Telescope photographic plates.

We present preliminary results from a programme designed to produce deep images of radio source fields drawn from the Parkes 2700 MHz and Molongolo 408 MHz catalogues using the charge-coupled-device (CCD) camera system built at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge. The programme is directed at a search both for faint extensions and nebulosity around radio QSOs and BL Lac objects and for faint objects in otherwise empty radio source fields; a detailed examination of the morphology of selected radio galaxies is also included.

We review the models of magnetic braking for synchronously rotating magnetic cataclysmic variables, and discuss the implications of magnetic braking for orbital evolution and the upper limit to the magnetic fields (about 70 MG) of the observed AM Herculis systems.