Composite image of moments before, during and after totality.
NASA/Aubrey Gemignani
An astronomer explains how. why and when eclipses happen, what scientists can learn from them, and what they would look like if you were standing on the Moon.
The Sun is currently middle-aged, having celebrated its 4,568,000,000th birthday at some point in the last million years.
Flickr/ChopWood CarryWater
In five or seven billion years time, the Sun’s life will come to an end. And it will be really spectacular - if you’re watching from far enough away.
In the beginning, the Universe expanded very, very fast.
Flickr/Jamie
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.
The ALMA telescope is searching.
ESO/C. Malin
Astronomers in Puerto Rico have picked up signal from a faint star that’s not like anything they’ve seen before.
Efforts praised to get more women in Australian astronomy, but more needs to be done.
Flickr/Paean Ng
Efforts to reduce the gender gap and encourage more women in Australian astronomy have been rewarded this week.
NASA
Studying mysterious neutron stars could uncover the secrets of exotic physics – and a way to navigate the stars.
Artist’s impression of Cassini ending its life as a fireball in Saturn’s atmosphere.
"NASA/JPL-Caltech
Cassini is about to crash into Saturn to avoid contaminating its habitable moon Enceladus.
Artist’s impression of Proxima Centauri b.
ESO/M. Kornmesser
You may even be able to find other planets around the star closest to our solar system.
Most South Africans don’t visit places where they can learn about science such as zoos and museums.
Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko
South Africans will not see the value that science and technology adds to their daily lives until there is more interest in areas of science.
Elenarts/Shutterstock
Researchers are looking at whether devastating asteroid strikes are predictable or random.
KELT-9B is the hottest known planet.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Researchers recently discovered the hottest planet known. But which one is the coldest? And the biggest?
Gravity of a white dwarf star warps space and bends the light of a distant star behind it.
NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI
Astronomers report the first ever measurement of light bending around a star other than our own.
A simulation of the latest binary black hole merger detected by LIGO. Blue indicates weak fields and yellow indicates strong fields.
Numerical-relativistic Simulation: S Ossokine, A Buonanno (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics) and the Simulating eXtreme Spacetime project Scientific Visualization: T Dietrich (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics), R Haas (NCSA)
Scientists have made a third detection of gravitational waves, again caused by the merger of two black holes. But they think there’s something different about the black holes in this case.
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.
Africa’s scientists are doing remarkable work.
Shutterstock
Africa’s overall contribution to research might be small, but smart people are undertaking smart and important work on and about the continent.
ASKAP at night.
Alex Cherney/terrastro.com
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.
When black holes collide, gravitational waves are created in space itself (image is a computer simulation).
The SXS (Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes) Project
Einstein called entanglement “spooky action at a distance”. But now it’s been used to design an incredibly sensitive detection method for gravitational waves.
ESO provides new ways to access the southern sky for Australian astronomy.
ESO/José Francisco Salgado
Australia’s new partnership with the European Southern Observatory will give our astronomers access to much bigger telescopes.
An astronomer today is more likely to be online than looking through a telescope.
AAP Image/CSIRO
Science today is increasingly data-driven, but our education system has not caught up.
Almost every star has planets – so there are more planets in our galaxy than there are stars.
NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle
Plants on other planets are bound to be even weirder than the strangest ones we find on Earth – if they even exist.