Nobel prizewinner Samuel Ting, early this morning (AEDT), announced the first results from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) search for dark matter. The findings, published in Physical Review Letters…
How is the spin of black holes measured, and what can it tell us about our universe?
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Astronomers have measured the spin of a black hole buried in the heart of a galaxy located 56 million light years away, and discovered it was spinning quickly – about as quickly as it could go. That was…
The chances of the weekends two asteroid events being related are next to zero.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
By Simon O'Toole, Australian Astronomical Observatory
One of the most exciting things about science is the detective work, and never was this more the case than Friday.
Within an hour or so of the event, almost everyone had seen the dramatic footage of the…
When it comes to asteroids, alert but not alarmed may be the best approach.
NASA
By Simon O'Toole, Australian Astronomical Observatory
An asteroid named 2012 DA14 will come within 27,700 kilometres of Earth early on Saturday morning Australian time (around 6:30am AEDT). At this distance the asteroid will pass within the orbits of several…
Two lobes of charged particles (light blue) have been discovered coming from the galactic centre.
Ettore Carretti, S-PASS, Axel Mellinger, Eli Bressert.
It’s not every day that you discover a huge structure that stretches more than half way across the sky. But this exact thing happened to the international team of astronomers I was leading, as we pored…
The Andromeda galaxy and its companions is challenging the very foundations of cosmology.
Adam Evans/Wikimedia Commons
Deep images of the sky reveal that the universe contains billions of galaxies. Some, such as our own Milky Way, are immense, containing hundreds of billions of stars. Most galaxies, however, are dwarfs…
We now know far more about the universe’s violent beginnings than we did in the 1940s.
matley0/Flickr
We are living in an era of science denial. An era when well-established facts are disputed, fake experts are interviewed by the media and blog posts trump science papers.
It’s an era of vaccine denial…
The SKA is on the horizon, but how do we get from here to there?
Pete Wheeler, ICRAR
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope has been on the cards since the early 1990s. It took until May of last year to find out where it will be built – in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand…
When you’re celebrating the New Year, be sure to spare a thought for Vesto Slipher and the birth of cosmology.
Nuwandalice
By Glen Mackie, Swinburne University of Technology
As 2012 comes to a close and you toast the New Year, be sure to also raise a glass to one Vesto Melvin Slipher.
My intent is to describe what Slipher did 100 years ago in Flagstaff, Arizona and why this…
Why do so many people believe in the Mayan apocalypse myth?
Apocalypse image from www.shutterstock.com
If you believe the hype, the end of the world has finally come. The Mayan calendar’s “long count” began on 13 August 3114 BCE and will end today on 21 December 2012. Why do people believe the world will…
Everything we see around us could be little more than bits in a giant supercomputer.
petertandlund
As a cosmologist, I often carry around a universe or two in my pocket. Not entire, infinitely large universes, but maybe a few billion light years or so across. Enough to be interesting.
Of course, these…
Programmers will find ways to harness the massively distributed global internet.
Night Owl City
Today I’m annoyed at Facebook. Among the amazingly witty and touching postings from my friends and Amnesty International are “pages you might like” and advertisements for things I don’t need, especially…
ASKAP will help scientists to tackle some of the biggest questions in radio astronomy.
Alex Cherney
Today, after several years of design and construction, CSIRO’s Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) is officially open.
The A$140m facility, built in the remote Murchison Shire of Western…
Despite ongoing research, we still know little about the universe’s earliest moments.
tychay
Earlier this week, headlines in several major newspapers screamed: “Melbourne researchers rewrite Big Bang theory”. You might think this is a reference to a new script for a popular TV show, but as a cosmologist…
The Big Bang theory and the existence of God are ideas often grappled with when thinking about how the universe was created.
DamienHR
Last week’s Global Atheist Convention and debates between prominent atheists and theologians in the Australian media has seen arguments about the existence of God getting a thorough airing.
In my view…
Collectively, these dishes would have the power to detect signals from the earliest years of the universe.
AAP/West Australian Government
A new University of Western Australia supercomputer that is 10,000 times faster than the average office PC could help scientists to develop the data processing capacity for the world’s largest telescope…
Two “new” black holes, in relatively nearby galaxies, are the largest ever found.
tsand
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…
What’s so special about the latest big discovery by NASA’s Kepler?
NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech
On Monday, to much fanfare, astronomers working with the Kepler space observatory (which was launched in March 2009) announced their first discovery of a planet orbiting within the “habitable zone” of…
“Infinite” is where we get to when we reach the limits of our understanding.
truly0utrageous
Peruse the astrophysical literature and you could be forgiven for thinking black holes exist. But do they really?
What makes a black hole special is its event horizon: a no-return gateway to an unknowable…
Most galaxies – including ours – host a hungry monster.
allthecolours
What do black holes eat? And do supermassive black holes have fiercer appetites? Let’s remind ourselves of the facts.
Lurking at the centre of the Milky Way is a monster, a giant black hole with a mass…
If the signs are right, fundamental equations of cosmology may need altering.
waljoris
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…
We know the universe is vast, but how do we measure the distances between things?
Dave Scrimshaw.
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…
Finding quasars will help us understand how galaxies were formed.
NASA
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…
Stars are immense, but the space between them is truly phenomenal.
chefranden
“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 would-be Jedi waits for Kepler in a galaxy far, far away.
It’s one of the most famous and evocative images in cinematic history – Luke Skywalker gazing out at the twin suns of Tatooine as they set, in the original Star Wars movie, A New Hope.
Such a view would…
A universe composed differently could still support complex life.
Susan NYC
Welcome to Peer Review, a series in which we ask leading academics to review books written by people working in the same field.
Here Geraint Lewis, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Sydney…
Warning: you may struggle to believe what you’re about to read.
Bluedharma
Just how big are the stars?
Earth feels quite big, what with it taking an entire day to fly between Sydney and London, and clearly the sun and moon are quite large in the sky.
But with virtually everything…
The universe teems with energy and matter we don’t understand.
stuant63/Flickr
In questioning the fundamental nature of the universe, cosmology regularly grabs the public’s attention.
But in an era in which we are observing deeper and more widely than ever before, our knowledge…
