Christiansen, Wilbur Norman

Born Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 9 August 1913

Died 26 April 2007

Australian radio astronomer W. N. (Chris) Christiansen received his degrees (B.Sc., 1934; M.Sc., 1935; and D.Sc., 1953) from the University of Melbourne. He was part of a group of radar physicists and engineers who, at the end of World War II, turned their attention to radio astronomy as part of the national research coordinating organization, the Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organization [CSIRO], under the leadership of E. G. (Taffy) Bowen and Joseph Pawsey . The group initially focused on studies of radio emission from the Sun (partly because solar interference had been a major concern in their radar days). In the late 1940s, Christiansen designed an array of 32 parabolic radio dishes to be built in an east–west line along the wall of a reservoir at Potts Hill. The rotation of the Earth carried the line of antennas around at different angles relative to the face of the Sun, so that a sort of map of...