Brad Carter, University of Southern Queensland dan 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Technology has redefined astronomy. Pioneering telescope designs have allowed astronomers to unravel ever more complex questions about the universe and its mysteries.
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.
The gravitational wave itself is the least exciting part of the announcement from LIGO and Virgo. Observing this new source answers many longstanding questions.
Jake Clark, University of Southern Queensland; Belinda Nicholson, University of Southern Queensland; Brad Carter, University of Southern Queensland, dan 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.
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.