Since the launch of the first artificial satellite in 1957 – the Soviet Union’s Sputnik 1 – countries around the world have been putting satellites and spacecraft into Earth orbit. While the majority of…
Is that a planet, a galaxy or a Rosetta Stone?
ichewmylips
A vital part of professional astronomy is collecting data using large telescopes. In many cases, these telescopes are national or international facilities, with time available to all through a competitive…
When a black hole devours a nearby star, bright gamma-ray flashes can result.
Mark Garlick (University of Warwick)
Some 3.8 billion years ago a star in the constellation of Draco wandered a little too close to a nearby black hole. The star was violently torn apart by the black hole’s tidal forces, creating two massive…
What do Chile’s recent volcanic eruptions and tomorrow morning’s total lunar eclipse have in common? Well … Just before sunrise, Earth’s shadow will totally hide the normally-bright moon for about 100…
Theories suggesting lunar influence on earthquakes have serious cracks.
penguinbush
With a total lunar eclipse set to occur just before sunrise (AEST) on Thursday, we can expect to see certain views regurgitated about our moon. Our satellite has been the focus of speculation and folklore…
Predicting the future is a mug’s game. When I reflect back on what we thought we knew at the start of my research career in the mid-1990s, I sound like a wizened octogenarian, recalling a simpler time…
You wouldn’t believe what modern telescopes can do.
Professor Fumolatro/Flickr
Last week, scientists set a new distance record, seeing a burst of gamma-rays from a star that exploded when the universe was only 520 million years old. The light from this distant source has been travelling…
Amelia Fraser-McKelvie (centre) with supervisors Dr Jasmina Lazendic-Galloway (left) and Dr Kevin Pimbblet (right).
Image courtesy of Monash University
An undergraduate astrophysics student at Monash University has detected some of the universe’s “missing mass”, solving a problem that had confounded scientists for many decades. Amelia Fraser-McKelvie…
The universe teems with energy and matter we don’t understand.
stuant63/Flickr
In questioning the fundamental nature of the universe, cosmology regularly grabs the public’s attention. But in an era in which we are observing deeper and more widely than ever before, our knowledge of…
Watching films such as Superman Returns or The Day after Tomorrow, you would have seen dramatic sequences of surging water and crumbling buildings. While doing so, mathematics was probably the last thing…
Is your stress from Venus, your pressure from Mars? Not likely.
Today, and for the next month, four major planets are aligned above us: Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter. Are we interested? Of course we are. From the very beginning of human history we’ve been obsessed…
There’s something happening, but it’s way above your head.
bluedharma/Flickr
Four planets – Mercury, Mars, Jupiter and Venus – will be aligned at dawn tomorrow. What does this mean? Should we be running for the hills? You’d be forgiven for thinking so. A search on Google or YouTube…
Dark matter has worked its way back into the news in the last few days with the completion of a detection experiment in a tunnel deep under the Italian Alps. Researchers from Columbia University used a…
Are CSIRO’s ASKAP antennas in Boolardy a precursor to greater things?
By Ant Schinckel, CSIRO
We know a lot about what the universe looks like and how it works. But what we’ve been able to figure out about the cosmos is dwarfed by all the things we don’t know. How do galaxies, stars and planets…
Viewed from afar, the Milky Way might appear similar to the galaxy known as NGC 7331.
R. Jay GaBany/NASA
Where are we within our galaxy? How did our galaxy form? How did it evolve over the aeons? Astronomers have been asking these questions for the past century, and have recently begun discerning the answers…
Hundreds of exoplanets have been discovered, but are we any closer to finding life?
AAP
In the late 1980s, when I was a young whipper-snapper just starting out as an astronomer, it was quite obvious some fields had an incredibly high profile and others were outré. The sexy ideas at the time…