Extragalactic astrophysicists want to know how and why galaxies stop forming stars, change their shape and fade away. With help from citizen scientists, they’re figuring it out.
Astronomers have built a new observatory in the cold dry air of a high plateau in Antarctica to peer through our atmosphere and observe carbon in our galaxy.
If some of the laws of physics were only infinitesimally different, we would simply not exist. It almost looks like the universe itself was built for life. But how can that be?
They’re are the overachievers of the universe: incredibly dense but very small when compared to others stars. So how much do we know about the extreme behaviour of neutron stars?
Researchers have created a star-forming cloud in the laboratory to try to recreate the first-ever biological molecule. The study could explain why such molecules are left-handed.
Tanya Hill, Museums Victoria Research Institute; Amanda Bauer, Australian Astronomical Observatory, and Sarah Brough, Australian Astronomical Observatory
What happens to a galaxy when it runs out of the stuff needed to forge new stars?
Jonti Horner, University of Southern Queensland and Tanya Hill, Museums Victoria Research Institute
A detailed study of comets orbiting the young nearby star Beta Pictoris is published today in the journal Nature, and it reveals striking similarities to the comets found in our solar system. Over the…
Clusters of galaxies have back-stories worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster: their existences are marked by violence, death and birth, arising after extragalactic pile-ups where groups of galaxies crashed…
What makes our sun shine has been a mystery for most of human history. Given our sun is a star and stars are suns, explaining the source of the sun’s energy would help us understand why stars shine. An…
A piece of the galaxy formation puzzle may have fallen into place, thanks to a team of European and American astronomers peering into the depths of our early universe. According to new research published…
The current theory of star formation has a problem: it cannot make big stars. In the standard star-making recipe, stars are formed in the depths of gas clouds made from molecular hydrogen. These clouds…