Australia’s Mopra telescope, nestled in NSW’s Warrumbungle National Park, is earmarked for closure in a year thanks to CSIRO funding cuts. But this one-of-a-kind telescope is well worth saving. Few of…
What future for the Parkes radio telescope amid the CSIRO cutbacks?
CSIRO/Wayne England
The future looks very bright for Australian radio astronomy but it was somewhat clouded earlier this year when CSIRO’s radio astronomy program took a dramatic hit in the Australian federal budget. CSIRO…
Three of the dishes used by the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder telescope.
CSIRO/Terrace Photographers
The first images from Australia’s Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope have given scientists a sneak peek at the potential images to come from the much larger Square Kilometre Array (SKA…
The origin of today’s burst of energy has astronomers puzzled.
AP Photographie /Flickr
A titanic eruption in our neighbouring galaxy, Andromeda, has sent shockwaves through the astronomical community here on Earth. NASA’s Swift satellite detected a flood of gamma rays at 21:15 UTC yesterday…
We’ve stellar astronomy research programmes and need to keep them up.
Flickr/xJason.Rogersx (image cropped)
AUSTRALIA 2025: How will science address the challenges of the future? In collaboration with Australia’s chief scientist Ian Chubb, we’re asking how each science discipline will contribute to Australia…
We’ve known about the energetic jets that spew matter from black holes for nearly a century, but what are they made of?
NASA
While we tend to think of black holes as giant cosmic vacuum cleaners, it’s not all one-way travel. As gas falls in towards a black hole, it spirals gradually inwards like water going down a plug hole…
Artist’s composite of the CSIRO’s 64m Parkes Radio Telescope showing an extragalactic radio burst appearing briefly, far from the Milky Way’s disk.
CSIRO/Harvard/Swinburne Astronomy Productions
How many electrons are there in the universe? That may seem nigh on impossible to calculate – let alone comprehend – but the discovery of a new population of astrophysical events called Fast Radio Bursts…
The SKA is on the horizon, but how do we get from here to there?
Pete Wheeler, ICRAR
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope has been on the cards since the early 1990s. It took until May of last year to find out where it will be built – in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand…
ARC Laureate Fellow and Winthrop Research Professor at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, UWA., The University of Western Australia