Two new coins released by the Royal Australian Mint celebrate Indigenous astronomers, who have used the stars to map changing seasons, inform the behaviours of plants and animals, and encode Law.
COVID-19 may have messed up school and shut down a lot of entertainment venues. But you can still brighten things up by doing a little stargazing at night, an astronomer says.
Following on from the 2019 International Year of Indigenous Languages, 2020 has seen 5 asteroids given new names recognising the contribution of illustrious Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Asteroid 2018 VP1 itself is too small and far away to see clearly, so here’s an artist’s impression of a near-Earth object.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
A small asteroid will cross Earth’s orbit on November 2. Scientists aren’t sure if the two will collide – but even if they do, there’s still no cause for alarm.
Neowise seen from the International Space Station.
NASA
When it comes to commercial space tourism, suborbital flight are the first frontier. But what are the risks? Are there health requirements? What should you know before taking such a way-out trip?
Artist’s impression of CHEOPS in orbit above Earth. In this view the satellite’s telescope cover is closed.
ESA / ATG medialab
Cosmologists had only been able to find half the matter that should exist in the universe. With the discovery of a new astronomical phenomenon and new telescopes, researchers just found the rest.
Mating laser-driven atomic clocks like the one shown here with microwaves promises more accurate electronic devices.
N. Phillips/NIST
Researchers have made some of the most accurate clocks imaginable in recent years, but the trick is harnessing those clocks to electronics. Using lasers to tune microwaves bridges the gap.
Like a cosmic butterfly in the sky, radio galaxy PKS 2014-55 was observed by CSIRO researchers with the Australian SKA Pathfinder telescope.
Asteroid Ryugu photographed from a distance of about 12 miles (20 kilometers) looks just gray and bland, but a close-up provides more color.
JAXA, University of Tokyo, Kochi University, Rikkyo University, Nagoya University, Chiba Institute of Technology, Meiji University, University of Aizu and AIST
It is a pretty spectacular achievement to not only rendezvous with an asteroid as it is whizzing around the Sun but also collect a sample. Here’s what the researchers learned.
No one knows what kicked off the Big Bang that eventually allowed the stars to begin forming.
Adolf Schaller for STScI
The term ‘Big Bang’ might make you think of a massive explosion. Put the thought out of your head. Rather than an explosion, it was the start of everything in the universe.
Earth and Moon as seen by the Galileo spacecraft.
NASA
Thirty years ago the Hubble Space Telescope began snapping photos of distant stars, providing a time machine that has taken astronomers back to when the universe was less than a billion years old.
Leap years were devised in Julius Caesar’s time, to fix the pesky problem that Earth’s year isn’t exactly 365 days. But 15 centuries later, our calendars were still slightly askew.