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…
Space is Big. Really Big. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy pretty much nailed space with those five words. And space is so really big that our earthly measures of distance struggle. The distance to…
My colleagues and I have confirmed the existence of a new type of star cluster – as published recently in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. But what are star clusters, and why do they…
Public participation in science is increasing, and citizen science has a central part in this. It is a contribution by the public to research, actively undertaken and requiring thoughtful action. Citizen…
As I write this, engineers at NASA and Ball Aerospace & Technologies have their fingers crossed they’ll be able to restart the stricken Kepler space observatory, which has been in hibernation mode…
Technology has, without doubt, expanded our understanding of space. The Voyager 1 space probe is on the brink of leaving our solar system. Massive telescopes have discovered blasts of fast radio bursts…
How many electrons are there in the universe? That may seem nigh on impossible to calculate – let alone comprehend – but the discovery of a new population of astrophysical events called Fast Radio Bursts…
It was written in the stars all along, but we’ve just found out: a whopping 70% of stars in a widely-studied cluster die before reaching old age which, for stars, is the most productive stage of their…
Sunanda Creagh, La Conversation Canada et Michelle See-Tho, La Conversation Canada
SS Cygni, a famous stellar system made up of one normal star and one dead star, is much closer than previously thought, according to a new study by Australian researchers and citizen scientists. The new…
As the most visible man-made object in the night sky the International Space Station (ISS) is of significance to humankind. It takes humans from being explorers of space to being residents of space. The…
Like all relationships, our association with the moon has had its ups and downs. In this series we’ve talked about the nature of the satellite and how we think it was formed - in a giant collision that…
From encouraging the first steps of life migrating from the oceans to the land, to stabilising Earth’s axial tilt against chaotic excursions, the moon is often put forth almost as a magical ingredient…
Australian astronomer Professor Ken Freeman has been awarded the American Astronomical Society’s top prize. The prestigious Henry Norris Russell Lectureship was awarded to Professor Freeman for his work…
Four buildings containing telescopes at Australia’s largest astronomical observatory have suffered smoke damage in a bushfire, the Australian National University said today. Access to the Siding Spring…
Australia’s biggest astronomical observatory was burned in a bushfire near Coonabarabran in Western NSW overnight, threatening over $100 million worth of research infrastructure and the largest optical…
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…
Whenever I’m telling students or people at conferences about Mercury, I always describe it as the “heavy metal” planet. Many things on this closest planet to the sun are extreme, from its 88-Earth-day…
Shortly after sunrise tomorrow morning the skies will go dark in northern Queensland. Many people, including myself and plenty from overseas, are flocking to Cairns to observe this celestial phenomenon…