University of Tasmania, Australia

The Galactic Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder Survey, which is what I am leading, is one of several different surveys that the new ASKAP telescope with its 36 identical antennas will do over the next five years. The galactic part is to study the Milky Way and what we see via the radio telescope is not so much the stars but the clouds of gas and dust between them. If you think about our solar system, the Earth, the sun, the other planets all formed out of the gravitational collapse of a cloud like that, a cloud that existed long, long ago with all the stuff that we have today on Earth. In fact, even the carbon, nitrogen and oxygen in our bodies came from that cloud.

A big leap out into space is also featured in Research to Reality, 2011 Edition 7