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April 2004
Meet the QVS-NSC Scientists!
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Meet Dr. Dave Jauncey: He was born a long time ago (his words), on June 13 1938 in Sydney Australia. He did his university "time" at Sydney University with a degree in physics and then a PhD in cosmic ray physics.He married Dorothy in April 1964 and just celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary the day before he flew out for the International Workshop in the Netherlands. On finishing his PhD in Sydney, he and Dorothy moved to Cornell University in Ithaca in up-state New York initially on a one-year post doc appointment. In the event they stayed and enjoyed a very happy almost 10 years at Cornell, where they had three dual-nationality (US and Australian) children; identical twin boys, Robert and Stephen, and a daughter, Marianne. While at Cornell Dave was fortunate enough to meet and work with Marshal Cohen. They collaborated with Ken Kellermann and Barry Clarke, who were working at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) at |
This collaboration was responsible for producing the first VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometer) in the US and because of this, they were all very happy to receive the Rumford Medal of the American Association of Arts and Sciences. This is where his abiding interest in high resolution imaging, in quasars and active galactic nuclei, grew.
While at Cornell, he became very good friends with Prof. Cyril Hazard, one of the discovers of Quasars, and with Prof. Martin Harwit, who was for some time the Director of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. Also, Carl Sagan, of COSMOS fame was another one of the friendly and interesting faculty members. In academic life you do get the chance to meet all sorts of interesting people.
While at Cornell, the whole family had the chance to do plenty of skiing in the winters and swimming in the summers and very much enjoyed the quiet life in rural up-state New York.
In 1974, they moved back to Australia, to take up a new job in Canberra making use of the NASA Deep Space Network (DSN) space tracking antennas, for radio astronomy. He started a long program of VLBI in Australia where they were able to observe many of the sky's most interesting radio sources, galaxies, and quasars, that are invisible to all of you in the northern hemisphere.
His program of observing intra-day variable sources really got started ten years ago with a young PhD student, Lucyna Kedziora-Chudczer, when they discovered the first of the very fast variable sources, PKS 0405-385. They found this source to double in flux density in an hour. Such rapid variability, if actually happening in the source, suggested that it was far too hot; hotter even than was thought possible. This led in turn to the now accepted idea that these radio variations are not happening in the quasar, but are caused by "twinkling" in the turbulent interstellar medium of our Galaxy. Those are big words to describe the "atmosphere" of our Galaxy. This twinkling is a lot like the twinkling we see in the stars every clear night, with a couple of important differences. Stay tuned for more information…