After six decades during which it tracked lunar missions, spotted distant pulsars and quasars, and even expanded our concept of the size of the Universe, the Parkes telescope is still going strong.
Astronomers have taken a close-up look at the jets of plasma streaking away from a supermassive black hole - one of the strangest and most energetic features of galaxies.
Vanessa McBride, International Astronomical Union's Office of Astronomy for Development
The pandemic has underscored that the world requires agility for survival. That makes blue skies science, which encourages curiosity and nimble thinking, perhaps more important than ever.
Australian astronomers are part of a prize-winning team that was the first to pinpoint the location of a fast radio burst. But there is much we still don’t know about these mysterious bursts.
Based on what we currently know about the density of giant radio galaxies in the sky, the probability of finding two of them in this region is extremely small.
We observed a powerful flare and a huge burst of radio waves from our nearest stellar neighbour, Proxima Centauri, indicating violent space weather around the star.
When the USSR launched the world’s first satellite, Sputnik 1 didn’t do much other than regularly “beep” over the radio. Yet, this simple sound is associated with the beginnings of space exploration.
ARC Laureate Fellow and Winthrop Research Professor at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, UWA., The University of Western Australia