It would be nice to blast dangerous nuclear waste far away from Earth, or into the Sun where it won’t cause any harm. However, it’s not as simple as it sounds.
NASA
At the end of the day, the problem is that no-one on Earth wants nuclear waste stored near them, and it's not safe or cost-effective to blast it into space.
The South Pole Telescope and BICEP telescopes (pictured above) may discover clues that could teach us if there was something else ‘before’ the Big Bang.
Dr. Keith Vanderlinde/NSF
Our brain cells do look a lot like a map of the universe – but that doesn't mean they're the same thing.
Captured: approximately 15,000 galaxies (12,000 of which are star-forming) widely distributed in time and space.
NASA, ESA, P. Oesch (University of Geneva), and M. Montes (University of New South Wales)
Astronomers are voting to rename one of the laws of physics. The voting may have far-reaching effects leading to renaming of other laws and giving 'forgotten' scientists due credit.
A podcast all about nothing. From the importance of doing nothing to the ill-effects of time spent in solitary confinement and what nothing means in space.
Pretty much as soon as we understood what galaxies were, we realised they are all moving away from each other. And the ones that are further away are moving faster. In short, the universe is expanding.
The things you can do with an amaterur telescope.
Shutterstock/AstroStar
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.
The first reliable measure of the 3D shape of galaxies and their rotation helps to shed light on their history.
Part of the new map of dark matter made from gravitational lensing measurements of 26 million galaxies in the Dark Energy Survey.
Chihway Chang/University of Chicago/DES collaboration
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.
Simulated universe: EAGLE collaboration, J Schaye et al 2015.
MNRAS
Is dark energy just an illusion, as is often suggested? To resolve the dilemma, interpreting the basic principles of general relativity in a complex Universe may need a rethink.
Artist’s conception of two merging black holes, spinning in a nonaligned fashion.
LIGO/Caltech/MIT/Sonoma State (Aurore Simonnet)
These ripples in the very fabric of the universe were hypothesized by Einstein a century ago. Now scientists have detected them for the third time in a year and a half – ushering in a new era in astrophysics.
It used to take weeks to find any of these mysterious signals from deep in space but when the new telescope started looking it found one within days. Then another.
ESO provides new ways to access the southern sky for Australian astronomy.
ESO/José Francisco Salgado