 So this is Brad here at ANU and I've been chatting with Alec and Lish from ABC Canberra and about how in space and especially in astronomy we can see light but see more than what our eyes can see. Yeah that's exactly right Brad. So astronomers were really focused on getting information out of light and what we're usually used to is looking at the visible spectrum of light the stuff that we can see but the full spectrum of light goes a lot lot further and so we can go down the rainbow towards the red end in fact we can go off the red end all the way down to what we call the radio spectrum of light. When I think of radio I think of stuff we hear not stuff we see. Well that's exactly right we're used to dealing with radio and listening to it you turn on the car we can hear your voice coming out of the radio but actually what's happening there is that we're sending information on a radio wave on a light wave and so radio is the most wavy kind of light and so it's really useful for putting information on to so whether that's music or voices on from a radio station or even things like Wi-Fi and radio waves will travel through anything that's not a conductor so it'll come to the walls it'll come through you and me but then we can measure it using something like this kind of antenna in front of us. How can we use this sort of light or sound to understand space? So we use something very similar to this kind of antenna so you can see here it has a lot of different lengths of metal in there and that lets us tune into different wavelengths of radio and we can have on this end a little receiver which in this case will turn that light signal into a sound signal which is very similar to what happens in your car so we're actually generating a signal inside this building right now so we turn this up. So is that picking up the sound of light? Exactly right so there's a light a radio light flashing inside this building that this antenna is picking up so that's the kind of fundamental difference here but there's a lot of other signals that come in from outer space but they're a lot lot weaker than anything that we make so for example a signal from a phone if we were to put that on the moon it would still be one of the strongest natural sources that we could possibly see with a radio antenna so to pick up all the far far weaker natural signals we build enormous dishes and put antennas similar to this on the top of the dish so we can amplify those signals and measure them the stuff that's coming in from space and that allows us to measure a whole heap of different things so stuff like gas moving around our galaxy and because that light in the same way it comes through the walls the light can pass through the entire galaxy we can look through the whole galaxy and see everything in it so whether it's gas or stuff going around black holes and even the afterglow of the Big Bang that all things we can see using radio light. So that makes you a radio astronomer. Yes. What do you call someone who looks at the light then? A light astronomer? No it's all still part of the light and that's something we do here at the ANU is that we're looking to combine all the different the whole spectra of light and gain all the information we can to get a whole picture of how the universe works.