A radical discovery by my colleagues and I – reported this week in Physical Review Letters – could help explain why it was possible for life (at least as we know it) to develop on Earth, but not in other…
Let’s talk numbers for a moment. The moon is approximately 384,000 kilometres away, and the sun is approximately 150 million kilometres away. The mean distance between Earth and the sun is known as the…
Finding quasars will help us understand how galaxies were formed.
NASA
Today, the University of Melbourne’s Professor Stuart Wyithe was awarded the 2011 Malcolm McIntosh Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year for his work on the origin of galaxies. The multi-award winning…
The climate change debate has diminished the standing of science in some people’s minds, Australia’s Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist said today, calling for lawmakers to ensure public policy was informed…
Professor Brian Schmidt helped discover that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating.
Belinda Pratten
An astrophysicist from the Australian National University has jointly won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for his part in the discovery that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. Harvard-educated…
Australian astronomers have mapped the cosmic filaments that bind the Milky Way together, which may help reveal how galaxies form.
Michael Boylan-Kolchin, University of California Irvine
Australian astronomers have shed new light on the cosmic filament that binds the Milky Way together, providing new clues on how the galaxy is formed and how it grows. The Milky Way, home to our solar system…
Stars are immense, but the space between them is truly phenomenal.
chefranden
“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.” Douglas Adams…
An exoplanet called Fomalhaut b has been photographed in an unexpected spot – so is it even an exoplanet at all?
NASA/http://www.nasa.gov
A distant planet that made its name as the world’s first directly photographed exoplanet is at the centre of an astronomical stoush, after it veered off course and new doubts were raised about its existence…
NASA’s Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, or UARS, is expected to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere tomorrow afternoon.
NASA/http://www.nasa.gov
A defunct NASA satellite is expected to fall to Earth some time tomorrow afternoon but the US space agency has said it’s not yet clear where the space junk will land. The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite…
A NASA spacecraft called Dawn has delivered fresh images of an enormous asteroid called Vesta, revealing new detail about the giant object’s turbulent past. A video made up of images collected as Dawn…
An artist’s impression of one of 16 new super-Earths recently found. This one orbits the Sun-like star HD 85512 in the southern constellation of Vela (The Sail).
ESO/M. Kornmesser
European astronomers have found 50 distant planets orbiting stars and 16 rocky “super-Earths”, planets that theoretically could support life. Expolanets, which orbit stars outside our solar system, were…
Science follows certain procedures, but does the media get the signal?
CSIRO
Recently my colleagues and I announced the discovery of a remarkable planet orbiting a special kind of star known as a pulsar. Based on the planet’s density, and the likely history of its system, we concluded…
Even the Hubble telescope, which took this picture of Bright Spiral Galaxy M81, is not capable of taking the wide-angle shots needed for all sky astrophysics, so new equipment must be invented.
NASA http://www.nasa.gov
Some astronomical questions can only be answered by looking at the whole sky all at once but the technology to do that doesn’t exist yet. Enter the new ARC Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics…
Finding a star as young as AP Columbae is very rare.
Flickr/tarotastic
Astronomers have a rare new star that is just 27 light years away from Earth, making it the closest young star ever found. AP Columbae, as the red dwarf star has been named, is just 40 million years old…
The Hayabusa space capsule landed in Woomera, South Australia, last year after completing a mission to collect dust from the surface of an asteroid.
Science/Hayabusa team
Asteroid dust collected by a Japanese space capsule that landed in Woomera last year has been matched with samples of meteorites found on Earth, providing new clues about where meteorites came from. The…
Stars shine, for sure, but PSR J1719-1438 is sporting some serious bling.
Robyn Beck/AFP
A planet has been found in our Milky Way galaxy that may be made entirely of diamond. As reported in Science today, an international astronomy team led by Swinburne University’s Matthew Bailes, has discovered…