Mopra Millimetre-Wave Observatory

The Mopra Telescope near Coonabarabran

The 22-m diameter Mopra millimetre-wave telescope, located at the foot of Siding Spring Observatory near Coonabarabran, is the largest such dish in the southern hemisphere. For the winter months, through a co-operative agreement with the CSIRO, the School of Physics operates the telescope. Half the time we have for our own projects and the other half we support the community with their own programs. This was our second year with the telescope. With the first year being mostly devoted to upgrading the telescope, it was our first attempt to obtain some serious science with it.

We worked on four projects; a molecular line survey towards a protostellar cloud, mapping the structure of the dense molecular gas towards the Rosette star forming complex, examining whether the telescope could be used for quasar absorption line studies (alas, this project was too hard for the present), and investigating the properties of "hot molecular cores". The last was the major project we undertook, searching for emission from the molecule methyl cyanide from regions suspected of harbouring the first stages in the formation of massive proto-stars. And we found plenty. Not from all our target list, to be sure, but from enough sources to be confident that we had found an important tracer of the early stages of star formation. However where this fits in as part of the overall evolutionary sequence in the birth of a star remains the subject of further investigation.