The Nobel Lecture of physics laureate Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University has been placed online. A video of Professor Schmidt’s lecture, “The Path to Measuring an Accelerating Universe…
The notebooks of Sir Isaac Newton, who was famously reported to have suffered a (scientifically) earth-shaking blow to the head from an apple, are being scanned and published online by the University of…
Space exploration is one of the few science-rich human endeavours that captivates both expert and layperson alike. There is a mystery – a romanticism – associated with space research and technology that…
Black holes have long been the staple of science fiction, being monstrous beasts with a gravitational pull that prevents even light from escaping. As well as being useful plot devices, offering mechanisms…
A radical discovery by my colleagues and I – reported this week in Physical Review Letters – could help explain why it was possible for life (at least as we know it) to develop on Earth, but not in other…
Let’s talk numbers for a moment. The moon is approximately 384,000 kilometres away, and the sun is approximately 150 million kilometres away. The mean distance between Earth and the sun is known as the…
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…
The climate change debate has diminished the standing of science in some people’s minds, Australia’s Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist said today, calling for lawmakers to ensure public policy was informed…
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…
Australian astronomers have shed new light on the cosmic filament that binds the Milky Way together, providing new clues on how the galaxy is formed and how it grows. The Milky Way, home to our solar system…
“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.” Douglas Adams…
A distant planet that made its name as the world’s first directly photographed exoplanet is at the centre of an astronomical stoush, after it veered off course and new doubts were raised about its existence…