Lucyna Kedziora-Chudczer has discovered a quasar which twinkles brilliantly at radio wavelengths.
Quasars are mysterious.
We know that they are amongst the most luminous sources in the Universe, but we do not know what makes them shine. Together with a team from the Australia Telescope National Facility, Lucyna Kedziora-Chudczer has studied the radio emission from over a hundred quasars, looking for clues which might help to explain what powers these beacons. Together with Mark Walker, Lucyna investigated various possibilities for explaining the brightness changes. However, they concluded that by far the best explanation for what was seen is that the quasar was scintillating, or twinkling. We are used to the scintillation of starlight, which is caused by turbulent structures in the Earth's atmosphere, and the same phenomenon can occur with radio waves as they propagate through the plasma in the interstellar medium.