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…
Supernovae are the brilliant, explosive deaths of stars. For a short time, these explosions can outshine an entire galaxy containing billions of stars. A recently discovered rare class of supernovae, termed…
Australian astronomer Ken Freeman has won the 2012 Prime Minister’s Prize for Science, more than 40 years after he revolutionised his field with his research on dark matter. Professor Freeman, the Duffield…
A new study of data from NASA’s Hubble telescope shows that the distant star Fomalhaut b really is a massive exoplanet and squashes claims made last year that it was just a dust cloud, researchers said…
Earlier this week, a Swiss-based team searching for planets outside our solar system (exoplanets) published a paper in Nature announcing the detection of an Earth-mass planet orbiting the star Alpha Centauri…
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…
New research published in the planetary science journal Icarus, shows the moon may have been formed by a glancing collision with an “impactor” in the violent days of the early solar system. Contrary to…
Last week, scientists using one of the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Cameras announced the discovery of a small moon orbiting the dwarf planet Pluto - the fifth satellite discovered in orbit around…
Explosive outbursts of super-hot gas in a galaxy 300 million light-years away have provided evidence of the first known “middleweight” black hole, according to scientists who observed the plasma jets with…
Humans have always had a deep affinity with the night sky. Over millennia the stars have guided us in our travels, provided a grand canvas for the great stories of mythology and invoked a sense of wonder…
The 6½-hour journey of Venus across the path of the sun has enthralled thousands of Australians gathered at viewing locations to witness the event. Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Brian Schmidt, a Distinguished…