This paper describes the system architecture of a newly constructed radio telescope – the Boolardy engineering test array, which is a prototype of the Australian square kilometre array pathfinder telescope. Phased array feed technology is used to form multiple simultaneous beams per antenna, providing astronomers with unprecedented survey speed. The test array described here is a six-antenna interferometer, fitted with prototype signal processing hardware capable of forming at least nine dual-polarisation beams simultaneously, allowing several square degrees to be imaged in a single pointed observation. The main purpose of the test array is to develop beamforming and wide-field calibration methods for use with the full telescope, but it will also be capable of limited early science demonstrations.

The second epoch Molonglo Galactic Plane Survey covers the area 245° ⩽ l ⩽ 365° and |b| ⩽ 10° at a frequency of 843 MHz and an angular resolution of 45 arcsec × 45 arcsec cosec(δ). The sensitivity varies between 1–2 mJy beam− 1 depending on the presence of strong extended sources. This survey is currently the highest resolution and most sensitive large-scale continuum survey of the southern Galactic plane. In this paper, we present the images of the complete survey, including postage stamps of some new supernova remnant (SNR) candidates and a discussion of the highly structured features detected in the interstellar medium. The intersection of these two types of features is discussed in the context of the ‘missing’ SNR population in the Galaxy.

The last few years has seen a dramatic increase in the number of exoplanets known and in the range of methods for characterising their atmospheric properties. At the same time, new discoveries of increasingly cooler brown dwarfs have pushed down their temperature range which now extends down to Y-dwarfs of < 300 K. Modelling of these atmospheres has required the development of new techniques to deal with the molecular chemistry and clouds in these objects. The atmospheres of brown dwarfs are relatively well understood, but some problems remain, in particular the behavior of clouds at the L/T transition. Observational data for exoplanet atmosphere characterisation is largely limited to giant exoplanets that are hot because they are near to their star (hot Jupiters) or because they are young and still cooling. For these planets there is good evidence for the presence of CO and H2O absorptions in the IR. Sodium absorption is observed in a number of objects. Reflected light measurements show that some giant exoplanets are very dark, indicating a cloud free atmosphere. However, there is also good evidence for clouds and haze in some other planets. It is also well established that some highly irradiated planets have inflated radii, though the mechanism for this inflation is not yet clear. Some other issues in the composition and structure of giant exoplanet atmospheres such as the occurrence of inverted temperature structures, the presence or absence of CO2 and CH4, and the occurrence of high C/O ratios are still the subject of investigation and debate.

The Chinese Spectral Radioheliograph is a solar dedicated radio interferometric array that will produce high spatial resolution, high temporal resolution, and high spectral resolution images of the Sun simultaneously in decimetre and centimetre wave range. Digital processing of intermediate frequency signal is an important part in a radio telescope. This paper describes a flexible and high-speed digital down conversion system for the CSRH by applying complex mixing, parallel filtering, and extracting algorithms to process IF signal at the time of being designed and incorporates canonic-signed digit coding and bit-plane method to improve program efficiency. The DDC system is intended to be a subsystem test bed for simulation and testing for CSRH. Software algorithms for simulation and hardware language algorithms based on FPGA are written which use less hardware resources and at the same time achieve high performances such as processing high-speed data flow (1 GHz) with 10 MHz spectral resolution. An experiment with the test bed is illustrated by using geostationary satellite data observed on March 20, 2014. Due to the easy alterability of the algorithms on FPGA, the data can be recomputed with different digital signal processing algorithms for selecting optimum algorithm.

We present the results of an approximately 6 100 deg2 104–196 MHz radio sky survey performed with the Murchison Widefield Array during instrument commissioning between 2012 September and 2012 December: the MWACS. The data were taken as meridian drift scans with two different 32-antenna sub-arrays that were available during the commissioning period. The survey covers approximately 20.5 h < RA < 8.5 h, − 58° < Dec < −14°over three frequency bands centred on 119, 150 and 180 MHz, with image resolutions of 6–3 arcmin. The catalogue has 3 arcmin angular resolution and a typical noise level of 40 mJy beam− 1, with reduced sensitivity near the field boundaries and bright sources. We describe the data reduction strategy, based upon mosaicked snapshots, flux density calibration, and source-finding method. We present a catalogue of flux density and spectral index measurements for 14 110 sources, extracted from the mosaic, 1 247 of which are sub-components of complexes of sources.

The spectral classifications of the stars from spectral data have been corrected from time to time and new spectral and luminosity classes have been assigned. Identifying stars with wrong spectral and luminosity classification has been a stupendous task from the huge catalogue of stars. In this work we describe a simple statistical technique to identify stars with wrong spectral and luminosity classification. We make use of the Hipparcos catalogue which has the most accurate measurement of the distance d of the stars. A comparison is made between the absolute V magnitudes MV computed using the observed V magnitude mV and d, with the standard absolute magnitude MV0 assigned to a spectral and luminosity classification for a large number of stars (with d < 100 pc). As expected, for most of the stars the difference between MV and MV0 lies within the range ±2 mag, due to the intrinsic nature of each star ignored in this generalisation. A systematic error analysis is made of all the observable used in the computation. Therefore to identify stars which we suspect to be wrongly classified, we look for abnormal deviation in |MV – MV0| ≥5. The location of these stars with respect to the galactic plain and interstellar extinction is also investigated to rule out effects due to variations in the interstellar extinction. From our results we see that some of the stars were indeed wrongly classified and have recently been reclassified (SIMBAD). The reclassification drastically reduces the |MV – MV0| deviation. The other stars in the list which have not yet been reclassified need to be spectroscopically investigated and classified again.

Spatial clustering nature of galaxies has been studied previously through auto correlation function. The same type of cross-correlation function has been used in the present work to investigate parametric clustering nature of galaxies with respect to masses and sizes of galaxies. Here, formation and evolution of several components of nearby massive early type galaxies (M* ≥ 1.3 × 1011 M⊙ have been envisaged through cross-correlations, in the mass-size parametric plane, with high redshift (0.2 ⩽ z ⩽ 7) ETGs. It is found that the inner most components of nearby ETGs have significant correlation (~ 0.5 ± (0.02–0.07)) with ETGs in the highest redshift range (2 ⩽ z ⩽ 7) called ‘red nuggets’ whereas intermediate components are highly correlated (~ 0.65 ± (0.03–0.07)) with ETGs in the redshift range 0.5 ⩽ z ⩽ 0.75. The outermost part has no correlation in any range, suggesting a scenario through in situ accretion. The above formation scenario is consistent with the previous results obtained for NGC5128 and to some extent for nearby elliptical galaxies after considering a sample of ETGs at high redshift with stellar masses greater than or equal to 108.73 M⊙. So the present work indicates a three phase formation instead of two as discussed in previous works.

The graphics processing unit has become an integral part of astronomical instrumentation, enabling high-performance online data reduction and accelerated online signal processing. In this paper, we describe a wide-band reconfigurable spectrometer built using an off-the-shelf graphics processing unit card. This spectrometer, when configured as a polyphase filter bank, supports a dual-polarisation bandwidth of up to 1.1 GHz (or a single-polarisation bandwidth of up to 2.2 GHz) on the latest generation of graphics processing units. On the other hand, when configured as a direct fast Fourier transform, the spectrometer supports a dual-polarisation bandwidth of up to 1.4 GHz (or a single-polarisation bandwidth of up to 2.8 GHz).

We present a revised effective wavelength and photometric calibration for the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer W4 band, including tests of empirically motivated modifications to its pre-launch laboratory-measured relative system response curve. We derived these by comparing measured W4 photometry with photometry synthesised from spectra of galaxies and planetary nebulae. The difference between measured and synthesised photometry using the pre-launch laboratory-measured W4 relative system response can be as large as 0.3 mag for galaxies and 1 mag for planetary nebulae. We find the W4 effective wavelength should be revised upward by 3.3%, from 22.1 to 22.8 μm, and the W4 AB magnitude of Vega should be revised from mW4 = 6.59 to mW4 = 6.66. In an attempt to reproduce the observed W4 photometry, we tested three modifications to the pre-launch laboratory-measured W4 relative system response curve, all of which have an effective wavelength of 22.8 μm. Of the three relative system response curve models tested, a model that matches the laboratory-measured relative system response curve, but has the wavelengths increased by 3.3% (or ≃ 0.73 μm) achieves reasonable agreement between the measured and synthesised photometry.

In the original publication of “A Subsystem Test Bed for Chinese Spectral Radioheliograph,” by A. Zhao, Y. Yan, and W. Wang, there were errors in the numerical data for Tables 4, 5, and 6. The authors have supplied replacement tables, which are replicated below. The authors regret these errors.