The nearest star α Centauri is a triple system. The star α Cen, one of the pointers to the Southern Cross, is itself a −0.3 mag visual binary consisting of a α Cen A, a G2V star popularly considered to resemble the Sun, and α Cen B, a KOV star. The orbital period is 80.089 years, the semimajor axis is 23.5 AU, the distance 1.34 pc, the masses are 1.11 and 0.92 (±0.03) M⊙ (Kamper & Wesselink 1977). The third star, Proxima Cen (V645 Cen) is a faint common proper-motion companion separated from α Cen AB by about 2°. It is known to most people only by virtue of being slightly closer to the Sun than is α Cen A, and therefore actually the closest star.. This 11th mag flare star is undoubtedly coeval with a α Cen AB, but being the least massive by a considerable margin, may have been ejected from the system shortly after formation.

It is generally agreed that early-type stars, and hence their HII regions, appear to develop preferentially in dense concentrations within molecular clouds. These parent molecular clouds owe their existence in two ways to the dust grains in the interstellar gas, a component which comprises about 1% by mass. First, dust grains provide stable surfaces upon which hydrogen atoms can come together to form molecules. Then, once formed, the molecules are protected in cloud interiors by dust absorption of the dissociating ultraviolet radiation which pervades the low-density interstellar medium.

The 30 Doradus region offers an excellent opportunity to study cluster formation processes and recent star formation in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

This paper presents results from a series of rocket flights which have yielded the first unambiguous evidence for the variability of a cosmic X-ray source. The evidence rests primarily on three flights, the first two of which were conducted from Woomera by a joint Universities of Adelaide and Tasmania (UAT) team, and the third from Hawaii by the Lawrence Radiation Laboratories (LRL) of California. Data from two additional flights, one by LRL and the other by the University of Leicester, support this evidence.

The naked-eye cluster, Messier 7, is situated in the constellation of Scorpius, south of the great Sagittarius star clouds, and close to the galactic centre.

The Edinburgh-Cape Bright QSO Survey is a very small sub-set of the Edinburgh Cape Blue Object Survey, which is a major survey to discover blue stellar objects brighter than B~18 in the southern sky. It will cover an area of sky of 10,000 square degrees with |b|>30 and dec <0. The blue stellar objects are selected by automatic techniques from U and B pairs of UK Schmidt Telescope plates scanned with the COSMOS measuring machine. Follow-up photometry and spectroscopy is being obtained with the SAAO telescopes to classify the types of objects brighter than B=16.5, with some of the more stubborn objects being subjected to AAO service spectroscopy. Some preliminary results for the 6% QSO minority are presented in this paper and comparison is made with the Palomar-Green QSO Survey in the north, which we find to be at least a factor of two incomplete.

Site testing campaigns in the mid-IR wavelength range have been carried out in Antarctica in the last two southern summer seasons. A description of the experimental apparatus and some preliminary results are presented in this work. Future plans are also discussed.

The traditional classification of solutions of the Lane-Emden equation

into E, F and M types is based on the value of the invariant quantity

Following the detection of the 9 cm ground-state triplet of CH by Rydbeck et al. (1973), preliminary observations at the CH frequencies were made with the Parkes 64-m telescope (beamwidth ∼6′ arc) in December 1973 and January 1974. We have detected the CH lines in many galactic HII regions and in the direction of the galactic centre.

Radio telescopes in more than 20 different countries on five continents are being used for VLBI observations of galactic and extragalactic radio sources, as well for applications to geodesy and geophysics. New radio telescopes and networks of radio telescopes dedicated to VLBI which are being built in the United States, the U.S.S.R., Italy, China, Poland, the U.K. as well as in Australia will greatly improve the sensitivity, resolution, image quality, and frequency coverage of the existing networks. The Mk II VLBI recording system, which is based on consumer type Video Tape Recorders, is widely used but the sensitivity is limited. Broad band recording systems are expensive, but are becoming more popular due to their much greater sensitivity. They are expected to dominate VLBI systems in the 1990s.

The first tests of an earth-to-space VLBI system took place in 1986, and by the mid 1990s dedicated VLBI antennas will be launched into earth orbit by the U.S.S.R. and by Japan in collaboration with Australia and other countries throughout the world. Space VLBI missions will give an order of magnitude improvement in resolution over the ground based VLBI networks operating at the same wavelengths.

Compact radio sources have been observed over several years at 2.3 GHz by interferometers of the NASA-JPL Deep Space Network with trans- or inter-continental baselines to study the secular behaviour of fine structure appearing in these sources. A comparison of the variation in flux density of components of diameter < 0.001 arcsec with the corresponding variation in total flux density of the source at the same frequency indicated that variations could be wholly ascribed to components of this order of magnitude.

Observations of extremely high brightness temperatures in astrophysical objects imply that coherent emission processes must be occurring. An emission process may be coherent due to an inverted energy distribution leading to maser action, or due to bunching of particles in a region less than or of order of the wavelength of the radiation. Calculations of emission by bunches have generally used either a fluid model, e.g. Buschauer and Benford (1976), or a single-particle approach which requires all particles to have the same velocity, e.g. Saggion (1975) uses elements of both. In this paper we investigate gyromagnetic emission by bunches using a single-particle approach which includes the effects of differing particle velocities on the radiation.

Stewart (1978) has reported four moving type IV bursts observed with the Culgoora radio heliograph at 43, 80 and 160 MHz. After an early phase, the brightness temperatures of the observed bursts decreased with increasing frequency and with time. The highest brightness temperature observed at 43 MHz was 1010K, and it seems that the brightness temperature would have been still higher at even lower frequencies. Existing theoretical ideas on moving type IV bursts are based on data (at 80 MHz primarily) which included no brightness temperatures in excess of 109K. the accepted interpretation involved gyro-synchrotron radiation from mildly relativistic electrons (energies ≈ 100 keV); reabsorption by the electrons themselves restricts the brightness temperature to less than about 100 keV ≈ 109K (Wild and Smerd 1972, Dulk 1973). Stewart’s (1978) new data at 43 MHz require that this accepted interpretation be modified; he has suggested that higher energy electrons are involved. An alternative suggestion is explored here, namely that the absorption might be negative. In other words, the high brightness temperatures observed could be due to a gyro-synchrotron maser involving electrons with energies of about 100 keV.

The Papa camera is a photon-counting array detector that uses optical encoding to locate photon events on the output of a microchannel plate image intensifier. The Sydney University camera is a 256×256 pixel detector which can operate at speeds greater than 1 million photons per second and produce individual photon coordinates with a deadtime of only 300 ns. It uses a new Gray coded mask-plate which permits a simplified optical alignment and successfully guards against vignetting artifacts.

There is no question that Australian radio astronomers are in urgent need of a telescope which can provide high angular resolution for both line and continuum projects. Planning for the Australian Synthesis Telescope (AST) began in 1975 (see Wellington 1976; Manchester 1977), and with the guidance of the AST Steering Committee and the Design Study Committee the instrument, although it may be overshadowed in some respects by the US Very Large Array (VLA), now has enough unique features to whet the scientific appetites of all Australian astronomers. The planning has reached a critical phase — a proposal, costed at $A17.3 million (in 1980), was submitted to the Minister for Science and technology in February 1981 for funding in the August 1981 budget.

The Hertzsprung phenomenon, in which secondary bumps in the light or velocity curves of cepheid variables occur at systematically earlier phases as the period lengthens, has been known for about 50 years. As part of his programme on non-linear computations of cepheid models, Christie has interpreted the effect as a progressive wave which originates near the surface, travels to the core and is reflected back. He found that the phase varied with period in the correct sense, but to make his models fit both the Hertzsprung and period-luminosity relations he had to assign to them masses only about a half of those expected from evolutionary theory. The discrepancy is one of the outstanding problems in the field.

The emission of plasma waves by beams of electrons travelling in a plasma is a phenomenon of critical importance in applied plasma physics (for instance in problems directly related to the achievement of controlled nuclear fusion) and also astrophysical research (e.g. in the theory of solar radio bursts). In principle, the mechanisms involved are all contained in the Boltzmann-Vlasov equation, where the field is the self-consistent electromagnetic field produced by the interaction between beam and plasma. Unfortunately this celebrated equation cannot be solved directly, because both the analytical and numerical methods that can deal with this equation are plagued by secular terms which restrict the time domain of validity of the solutions to a few thousand plasma periods. In all applications of interest this domain is far too small; indeed in all astrophysical cases it is quite negligible compared with the duration of the observed phenomena (it is even much shorter than the time resolution of present-day equipment, such as dynamic spectrographs).

The problem of radiative transfer in the presence of a magnetic field may be formulated in terms of four interdependent differential equations for the four Stokes parameters I, Q, U and V (Hardorp et al. 1976)