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…
Professor Brian Schmidt helped discover that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating.
Belinda Pratten
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…
A would-be Jedi waits for Kepler in a galaxy far, far away.
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…
Science follows certain procedures, but does the media get the signal?
CSIRO
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…
Even the Hubble telescope, which took this picture of Bright Spiral Galaxy M81, is not capable of taking the wide-angle shots needed for all sky astrophysics, so new equipment must be invented.
NASA http://www.nasa.gov
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…
Stars shine, for sure, but PSR J1719-1438 is sporting some serious bling.
Robyn Beck/AFP
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…
Get to grips with the latest development in cosmic couture.
NASA
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…
We still have plenty to learn about our own galaxy.
Doug Klembara
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’s Cassini spacecraft has captured images of a storm on Saturn so big, it has wrapped itself around the giant planet.
NASA
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…
Artistic view of a close-up of a supermassive black hole. This image shows the material surrounding the black hole, which ultimately will fall in the central region releasing the X-ray radiation detected in this work.
NASA/CXC/A.Hobart
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…
Scientists believe dark matter makes up 23% of the universe.
NASA
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…