Wilbur Norman Christiansen
Overview
Melbourne
Melbourne is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia. The Melbourne City Centre is the hub of the greater metropolitan area and the Census statistical division—of which "Melbourne" is the common name. As of June 2009, the greater...
, Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
– 26 April 2007) was a pioneer Australian radio astronomer
Radio astronomy
Radio astronomy is a subfield of astronomy that studies celestial objects at radio frequencies. The initial detection of radio waves from an astronomical object was made in the 1930s, when Karl Jansky observed radiation coming from the Milky Way. Subsequent observations have identified a number of...
.
Christiansen built the first grating array for scanning the sun
Sun
The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is almost perfectly spherical and consists of hot plasma interwoven with magnetic fields...
at Potts Hill Reservoir. A later array at Badgerys Creek, New South Wales
Badgerys Creek, New South Wales
-People:According to the 2006 census taken by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Badgerys Creek had a population of 721, an improvement on the 1996 figure but still less than half the number in 1981. Well over half the houses were being rented , largely because of the federal government's...
, the Chris Cross Telescope, was named for Christiansen. For many years, he was chairman of the electrical engineering department at the University of Sydney
University of Sydney
The University of Sydney is a public university located in Sydney, New South Wales. The main campus spreads across the suburbs of Camperdown and Darlington on the southwestern outskirts of the Sydney CBD. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and Oceania...
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His father was a clergyman and his mother a music teacher.