Space Weather with Radio Telescopes in Australia

<p><span>CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, operates a number of world-class radio astronomy observatories that are collectively known as the Australia Telescope National Facility (ATNF). The facility offers a powerful view of the southern hemisphere radio spectrum and supports world-leading research by Australian and international astronomers. Decades after the Culgoora Radioheliograph made fundamental discoveries about solar radio bursts, a new generation of radio telescopes in Australia are providing unique measurement capabilities to address outstanding questions in Heliophysics. Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara (&#8220;Sharing the Sky and Stars&#8221;), the CSIRO Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia, is home to the Murchison Widefield Array (operated by a consortium led by Curtin University), the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), and the future home of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA)-Low Telescope. </span><span>Interplanetary scintillation (IPS) measurements by these </span><span>radio telescope arrays will provide important observational constraints </span><span>of the solar wind and interplanetary coronal mass ejections (ICMEs). This is enabled by simultaneous detections of a high density of scintillating sources over a wide field of view.</span> <span>Complementarily, Parkes Radio Telescope observations towards pulsars may provide density and magnetic field diagnostics of the corona and solar wind. </span><span>In addition, radio observations toward exoplanet host stars give important constraints on the habitability of exoplanets.</span><span> In this presentation, we will introduce the facilities, relevant radio astronomical diagnostics, early results, and plans for using the observations for data assimilation.&#160;</span></p>