Radio telescopes are normally used for looking at very distant objects thousands, millions, or possibly even billions of light years away. But to do that, they have to look through the Earth’s atmosphere. For some radio astronomers the distorting effects of our atmosphere are an annoyance, but earlier this year Australian astronomers using the Murchison Widefield Array found something theorised to exist but never before seen: tubes of ionised plasma tracing our planet’s magnetic field. I spoke to Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research about the discovery, as well as a few much more local radio phenomena…

Originally broadcast (in edited form) on 25th June 2015 as part of Pythagoras’ Trousers on Radio Cardiff.