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…
A simulated Black Hole of ten solar masses as seen from a distance of 600km with the Milky Way in the background.
Ute Kraus/Wikimedia
The concept of a “black hole” is one of the most curious in astrophysics. It’s the answer to the question: “What happens if the density of matter in a region becomes so high that not even light can escape…
The search for gravitational waves is far more than just a novelty.
msmail
In my previous article we discussed the “who, what, when, where and how” of the worldwide gravitational wave detection effort. The observant observer will have noticed we’re still missing the “why”. Why…
Don’t look at the transit of Venus directly … but make sure you look at it.
Jan Herold
When Australia II won the America’s Cup yacht race in 1983, then-prime-minister Bob Hawke famously exclaimed: “Any boss who sacks anyone for not turning up today is a bum.” Taking inspiration from this…
Everyone’s getting a slice of the SKA, whichever way you cut it.
swishphotos
Late last week, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) board chairman, John Womersley, announced that the future telescope will have more than one home: Australia/New Zealand and South Africa. The announcement…
The global push to detect gravitational waves could provide an enormous return for science.
Wikimedia Commons
Albert Einstein made an executive decision to revolutionise our understanding of gravity in a paper published in 1916. Nearly 100 years on, a key prediction of Einstein’s theory has eluded direct detection…
Trojans such as (1173) Anchises appear to have been caught in Jupiter’s orbit, mid-flight.
Dave Hosford
You’ll remember that, about a year ago, Canadian astronomers announced the discovery of a small asteroid sharing the earth’s orbit. The asteroid in question, 2010 TK7, is a “planetary Trojan” – an object…
It’s been the defining question of high-energy astrophysics for the past century: where do cosmic rays come from? New findings from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole have brought us closer…
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…
It’s time we got to the core of our planet’s early history.
Derringdos
As of today, the world might have changed forever. A fundamental assumption underpinning much of modern geochemistry is that the earth has the same composition as a class of meteorites called chondrites…
When the Obama administration announced its proposed NASA budget in February, astronomers worldwide breathed a sigh of relief. Despite significant cuts in other areas, funding for the James Webb Space…
Professor Michael Ashley recently returned from Antarctica where he deployed a telescope to one of the most remote locations on Earth – a place known as Ridge A, 850km from the South Pole. This is the…
Ever since they were discovered accidentally in the 1960s, gamma ray bursts (GRBs) have continued to amaze and puzzle astronomers worldwide. In nearly 50 years of research there seem to have been more…