There is a myth that goldfish have a three-second memory, and I sometimes wonder if the same is true about the part of the human mind that deals with science in the news. This week, the international media…
Academic rigour, journalistic flair
Articles on Cosmology
Displaying 101 - 120 of 137 articles
Cosmologists have detected a long sought component in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), which will help us to further…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Atoms cooled to extremely low temperatures have been observed entering a rare state called “quantum criticality”. Physicists…
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…
Top contributors
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Professor of Astrophysics, University of Sydney
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Pro Vice-Chancellor Flagship Initiatives, Swinburne University of Technology
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Associate Professor in Astronomy, Monash University
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Reader in Astrophysics, UCL
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John Curtin Distinguished Professor (Radio Astronomy), Curtin University
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Professor (Astrophysics), University of Southern Queensland
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Cosmologist, University of Tasmania
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Professor in Theoretical Physics, University of Southampton
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Emeritus Professor, ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery, OzGrav, The University of Western Australia
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ARC Laureate Fellow, Swinburne University of Technology
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Australian Government Women in STEM Ambassador, Professor of Practice, UNSW Sydney
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Professor, The University of Queensland
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Web and database guy, Macquarie University
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Researcher at Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics and the Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University
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Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics, University of Cambridge
