The drive the get more women involved in science should start at an early age. But as one space researcher found out, girls can get nudged out of science at school.
You can’t just buy a radio telescope receiver off the shelf. So CSIRO has been hard at work building receivers for the world’s largest telescopes using the very latest technology.
An illustration showing the merger of two black holes and the gravitational waves that ripple outward.
LIGO/T. Pyle
The observation of gravitational waves from a second black hole merger implies there are many more black holes in the universe than scientists had previously anticipated.
An artists’s impression of how common planets are around the stars in the Milky Way.
ESO/M. Kornmesser
A look at some of the more obscure methods astronomers use to detect planets around other stars, in the second of a two-part series on finding world’s elsewhere in the universe.
The new discovery: The C-shaped “wide angle tail galaxy” (pink) surrounded by the galaxies of the Matorny-Terentev cluster (white).
Julie Banfield
The find by citizen scientists of at least 40 galaxies in a cluster more than a billion light years away is the astronomical equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack.
In the Exoplanet Era, we are learning that planets abound in the cosmos.
ESO/M. Kornmesser
Astronomers have discovered more than 3,000 planets around other stars, so far. In the first of a two-part series we look at how they find world’s elsewhere in the universe.
There are two broad ways to measure the expansion of the universe. One is based on the cosmic microwave background, shown here, along with our own galaxy viewed in microwave wavelengths.
ESA, HFI & LFI consortia (2010)
The universe is expanding faster than expected, but we don’t know what’s driving it. Here are a few of the possible explanations, from dark energy to a modification of general relativity.
Artist’s rendition of one of the billions of rocky exoplanets in our galaxy.
Did life once exist on its surface?
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Complex life may be rare in the universe because most planets become either too hot or too cold before life has a chance to get a foothold. This might explain why we have yet to bump into E.T.
An artist’s impression of the galaxies found in the ‘Zone of Avoidance’ behind our Milky Way.
International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research
We take our understanding of the solar system for granted, but it took centuries to figure out. The original writings of Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo and others show how they sparked a revolution.
An artist’s impression of a transiting Jupiter-mass exoplanet around a star slightly more massive than the sun.
ESO
It was a rare and brief event, but powerful telescopes helped scientists get a glimpse of a black hole letting out a wind at 3,000km per second.
ESA’s Swarm constellation reveals new rapid changes of our magnetic field, tied directly to the heart of our planet’s molten iron core.
ESA/ATG Medialab
Space research never stops and it seems neither do the surprises. On ABC Breakfast News I covered some huge results from the last few weeks. Be still my beating (magnetic) heart Earth’s magnetic field…
Those tiny streaks sometimes land, and they can tell us a lot about the sky.
rwarrin/Flickr
The number of known exoplanets doubled this week to more than 3,200. But why have only a handful of these those new planets caught people’s imagination?
We’re on the hunt for life – what do we do when we find it?
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
We don’t need to look for Earth-like planets exclusively around Sun-like stars. Tiny, dim TRAPPIST-1 has only 11 percent the diameter of the Sun and is much redder.
All is not calm in the cosmos.
ESA/Hubble and NASA
Stargazing seems such a quiet, calm activity. But whether our eyes can see or not, those stars out there are in constant flux. Time-domain astronomy studies how cosmic objects change with time.
A burst of ghostly neutrinos may have been generated by a quasar like this.
ESO/M. Kornmesser