Astrophysicist Matthew Bailes wins 2024 Prime Minister’s Prize for Science

For an illustrious career studying pulsars and mysterious bursts of cosmic radiation, astrophysicist Matthew Bailes has won the 2024 Prime Minister’s Prize for Science.

The Swinburne University of Technology professor has been recognised for his part in discovering fast radio bursts — powerful blasts of radio waves that can help scientists better understand the Universe — and his leadership in Australian astronomy research.

“It’s a lovely surprise,” Professor Bailes said.

“If you told me as a child that one day I would receive a prize from the Prime Minister, I don’t think I would’ve believed you.”

But his work has not always been smooth sailing, with a mistake early in his career leading him to once think his life in academia was over.

A ‘catastrophic, famous discovery’

Professor Bailes likes to point out he was born on the day the first discovery of a quasar was published. He spent his life working with radio telescopes to find signals of similar far-flung objects.

His work began with pulsars, which are neutron stars that flash beams of radiation into space like a lighthouse.

“The hot topic when I was a young scientist were these things called millisecond pulsars. These are neutron stars that rotate up to 700 times a second,” he said.

“It’s such a tiny niche area that in order to advance, you basically have to build your own instruments, but I wasn’t very good at circuit design.”

Instead, he started working on software to analyse the data that had already been collected.

Alas, his approach didn’t always work.

When he was in his 20s, he made what he describes as a “catastrophic, famous discovery”. He, along with his supervisor and another colleague, thought that they had discovered the first planet outside our Solar System, but six months later it was found to be a software error.

“Instead of being very careful, we leapt for glory and it ended in tragedy,” he said.

But instead of him and his colleagues being the laughing stock of the astronomical community, they were given a second chance after admitting their mistake at the prestigious American Astronomical Society’s annual meeting.

“[Then-supervisor Andrew Lyne] trudged off the stage, thinking people would be throwing tomatoes, but Americans being Americans stood up and gave him a standing ovation,” Professor Bailes said.

“I thought, next time I need to be more careful and try and earn back the respect of our peers … get our reputations back to at least acceptable levels.”

Fast radio bursts

That costly mistake was in the back of Professor Bailes’s mind throughout his work that led to the discovery of what we now know as fast radio bursts, or FRBs.

It started when he met up with his former PhD student Duncan Lorimer, and asked him if he’d found anything interesting lately.

Professor Lorimer, then at West Virginia University in the US, put up a graph showing data from a 2001 survey of pulsars from Murriyang — the Parkes radio telescope.

He and a colleague, Maura McLaughlin, searched archival data for interesting single pulses of radio waves. Most could be easily categorised. The pulse Professor Lorimer showed Professor Bailes could not.

It was a huge spike of emissions, lasting just a few milliseconds. It was much stronger than the pulsars they were used to looking at, recalled Professor Bailes, who remembered it as “ridiculously bright and absolutely perfect”.

After some initial calculations, along with Professor McLaughlin, the three researchers thought they might have found something brand new.

“Knowing something that almost nobody else in the world knows about the Universe is a very rare treat.”

They published their bright burst in the November 2007 issue of the journal Science.

But as years passed without anyone else finding another fast radio burst, Professor Bailes began to doubt his findings.

It didn’t help that a similar signal found by a PhD student in Parkes data turned out to be emissions escaping a kitchen microwave at the site, not radio waves from a distant galaxy. 

Even reports in 2013 of a few more genuine extraterrestrial bursts found in archival data from Parkes didn’t reassure him. The whole world was looking for fast radio bursts, so why was Parkes the only telescope finding them?

But things turned a corner when a new fast radio burst was found by astronomers at the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico in 2014.

Initially Professor Bailes feared the Arecibo signal might be coming from a different brand of microwave oven.

“But when [the signal] was traced to a host galaxy, it was beyond doubt,” he said.

Astronomers now know that fast radio bursts last just a few microseconds to seconds and release as much energy as 500 million Suns.

That first fast radio burst, called FRB 010724 and affectionately dubbed the “Lorimer Burst”, is still one of the brightest detected, and came from a galaxy billions of light-years away.

Thousands of fast radio bursts have been discovered since. Researchers use them to measure the magnetic field strength between galaxies or understand the mass of the Universe.

Life after fast radio bursts

Today Professor Bailes is the director of the ARC Centre of Exellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery, or OzGrav, where he coordinates Australia’s research into gravitational wave science.

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Gravitational waves, which are ripples in space and time caused by huge, energetic objects in the Universe, made headlines a few years ago when direct evidence of them was found for the first time.

The team is now using a network of pulsars to try and find gravitational waves from supermassive black holes.

As gravitational waves travel through space, scientists on Earth can detect their presence through their subtle effect on pulsar beams.

While all this work is important, Professor Bailes lights up most when he talks about his current “pet project”, the ASTRAL Institute.

“I try and get kids who are interested in space and science to come and work with real researchers while they’re still in high school,” he said. 

“At the moment the kids are preparing a school holiday programme that other kids will be able to come to where they’ll learn about the Solar System.

“I think it would be more powerful to have other kids give the talk, because then the kids will see, ‘Oh, they’re not much older than me, and they’re already working on space. Maybe I can do that too.'”

Professor Bailes is proud of what he’s achieved throughout his career, and is now focused on the next generation of scientific leaders.

And he feels especially chuffed by the fact that there is an instrumental post-rock band in Germany called “Lorimer Burst”.

The rest of the winners

The $250,000 Prime Minister’s Prize for Science was one of seven prizes awarded tonight. The four other science and innovation prizes and two science teaching prizes were awarded to:

• Professor Andrew Wilks and Dr Chris Burns from biotechnology company Cytopia were awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize for Innovation ($250,000) for inventing and commercialising a drug called momelotinib to treat a rare form of blood cancer. Professor Wilks founded Cytopia, and the two researchers invented the drug, which has now been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration and European Medicines Agency. It is a rare achievement for an Australian-invented drug to be approved by the FDA.
• Professor Britta Regli-von Ungern-Sternberg from the University of Western Australia was the winner of the Frank Fenner Prize for Life Scientist of the Year ($50,000) for her life-changing research into reducing risks associated with anaesthesia for children, making surgery and recovery safer. Her work was incorporated into international guidelines and has changed how anaesthesia for children is performed worldwide.
• Professor Tianyi Ma from RMIT University received the Malcolm McIntosh Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year ($50,000) for pioneering a new technology that reduces the cost of producing green hydrogen, as well developing a process that turns carbon dioxide captured from industrial activities into naturally occurring chemicals. 
• Dr Andrew Horsley, from Quantum Brilliance, was awarded the Prize for New Innovators ($50,000) for his work trying to make quantum computing an everyday technology. Dr Horsley and his team created a technique that uses synthetic diamonds to build quantum computers that operate entirely at room temperature. This offers the possibility for quantum computing to move beyond fixed locations and is critical to scaling up the power of diamond quantum computers.
• Mr Daniel Edwards, STEM teacher at Montello Primary School in Tasmania, was awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching in Primary Schools ($50,000) for creating unique opportunities for students of all abilities and backgrounds to overcome challenges, engage with STEM subjects and consider a career in science. Mr Edwards is the founding CEO of GreenSTEM Education, Tasmania’s first STEM-education-focused charity which provides equitable access to STEM education for young people from under-represented backgrounds.
• Ms Alice Leung, from Concord High School in New South Wales, was awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching in Secondary Schools ($50,000) for her creative teaching strategies to equip students from diverse backgrounds with STEM knowledge and skills for the future. She creates programs to enable students to access technical scientific vocabulary, catering especially for the 70 per cent of students at her school from non-English-speaking backgrounds.