Professor Michael Ashley recently returned from Antarctica where he was deploying a telescope to one of the most remote locations on Earth – a place known as Ridge A, 850km from the South Pole. This is…
Professor Michael Ashley is currently in Antarctica to deploy a telescope to one of the most remote locations on Earth – a place known as Ridge A, some 850km from the South Pole. This is the second instalment…
Today, the University of Melbourne’s Professor Stuart Wyithe was awarded the 2011 Malcolm McIntosh Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year for his work on the origin of galaxies. The multi-award winning…
An astrophysicist from the Australian National University has jointly won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for his part in the discovery that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. Harvard-educated…
It’s one of the most famous and evocative images in cinematic history – Luke Skywalker gazing out at the twin suns of Tatooine as they set, in the original Star Wars movie, A New Hope. Such a view would…
Recently my colleagues and I announced the discovery of a remarkable planet orbiting a special kind of star known as a pulsar. Based on the planet’s density, and the likely history of its system, we concluded…
Some astronomical questions can only be answered by looking at the whole sky all at once but the technology to do that doesn’t exist yet. Enter the new ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics…
A planet has been found in our Milky Way galaxy that may be made entirely of diamond. As reported in Science today, an international astronomy team led by Swinburne University’s Matthew Bailes, has discovered…
In the past week, many media outlets have reported the discovery of an antimatter “belt” circling the earth. A range of potential uses for this belt have already been floated – perhaps the most exciting…
Welcome to the third instalment of If I had a blank cheque … a series in which leading researchers reveal what they could (and would) do in their discipline if money were no object. Today we hear from…
NASA has released photographs and audio of a powerful lightning storm on the planet Saturn that is eight times the surface area of Earth. The storm is so long it encircles the giant planet and its head…
Astrophysicists have discovered black holes that formed up to 12.5 billion years ago – among the oldest examples of the phenomena ever seen. Black holes are objects in the Universe where a large amount…
Dark matter has worked its way back into the news in the last few days with the completion of a detection experiment in a tunnel deep under the Italian Alps. Researchers from Columbia University used a…