The good thing about space is that – even though it has lots of dangerous stuff floating in it, and lots of exploding stars – it’s so big and empty that it almost doesn’t matter.
NASA/CXC/U.Texas
Brad Carter, University of Southern Queensland and Jake Clark, University of Southern Queensland
There are lots of places where it’s much, much hotter than the Sun. And the amazing thing is that this heat also makes new atoms - tiny particles that have made their way long ago from stars to us.
The ALMA telescope has seen tantalising hints of a violent event.
ESO/B. Tafreshi/TWAN (twanight.org)
We are in the Milky Way. If you travelled on an extremely fast spaceship for more than two million years, you would reach our neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy. All other galaxies are even further away.
New heavy nuclei are constantly generated in stars and other astronomical bodies.
Erin O’Donnell
People long assumed all the elements we see now were created during the Big Bang. But on May 2, 1952, an astronomer reported spotting new elements coming from an old star and changed our origin story.
Gaia’s view of our Milky Way and neighbouring galaxies.
ESA/Gaia/DPAC
Detailed information about stars in our galaxy could help us discover new exoplanets.
The Vela pulsar makes about 11 complete rotations every second, it also has a glitch.
X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ of Toronto/M.Durant et al; Optical: DSS/Davide De Martin
Signals from the first stars to form in the universe have been picked up by a table-sized detector in a west Australian desert. The find also hints at an early interaction with dark matter.
Artist’s impression of how the first stars in the universe may have looked.
N.R.Fuller, National Science Foundation
On a clear night you can see thousands of stars in the night sky, and there are billions more in our galaxy alone. But are the official star names really up for sale?
Milky Way star map by Bill Yidumduma Harney, Senior Wardaman Edler.
Bill Yidumduma Harney
The precious metal is literally extra-terrestrial, produced in the heart of the stars. How and under what conditions? Scientists know more thanks to a double astrophysical observation.
Blink and you’ll miss it – until the next one.
Channone Arif/Flickr
Technology has redefined astronomy. Pioneering telescope designs have allowed astronomers to unravel ever more complex questions about the universe and its mysteries.
Illustration of hot, dense, expanding cloud of debris stripped from the neutron stars just before they collided.
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab
Until the recent observation of merging neutron stars, how the heaviest elements come to be was a mystery. But their fingerprints are all over this cosmic collision.
Simulation of two neutron stars merging.
NASA/AEI/ZIB/M. Koppitz and L. Rezzolla
The gravitational wave itself is the least exciting part of the announcement from LIGO and Virgo. Observing this new source answers many longstanding questions.
Lasers being shone from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile.
These lasers help remove the twinkles in the night sky and help astronomers see stars clearer on Earth than ever before.
F. Kamphues/ESO
Jake Clark, University of Southern Queensland; Belinda Nicholson, University of Southern Queensland; Brad Carter, University of Southern Queensland, and Jonti Horner, University of Southern Queensland
How exactly do the stars twinkle in the night sky? As it turns out, the answer is full of hot air… and cold air.
In the beginning, the Universe expanded very, very fast.
Flickr/Jamie
What caused the Big Bang is still a mystery. And that’s just one of the many unanswered questions, in spite of everything we do know about the birth of the Universe.
ESO provides new ways to access the southern sky for Australian astronomy.
ESO/José Francisco Salgado