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Articles on Astronomy

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Patience can be rewarded as with this composite of the 2016 Geminids meteor shower, seen over Mt Teide volcano on the Canary Islands, off Spain. Flickr/StarryEarth

Look up! Your guide to some of the best meteor showers for 2017

2017 is looking to be a spectacular year for meteor showers. So here’s what to look out for in both the northern and southern skies.
Old sky map depicting boreal and austral hemispheres with constellations and zodiac signs. Marzolino/Shutterstock

What would the ancient astrologers have told us about 2017?

Up until the seventeenth century, astrology was seen as a scholarly tradition, and it is credited as influencing the development of many modern day subjects.
The discovery of the year was the first detection of gravitational waves. LIGO/T. Pyle

2016: the year in space and astronomy

Colliding black holes to exploding spacecraft, 2016 was an incredible year for astrophysics.
Part of CSIRO’s ASKAP antennas at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO) in Western Australia. Australian SKA Office/WA Department of Commerce

A machine astronomer could help us find the unknowns in the universe

It’s almost impossible for any human to spot something unknown or unusual in the massive amount of data collected by our telescopes. So we’re teaching an intelligent machine to search the data for us.
The GLEAM view of the centre of the Milky Way, in radio colour. Red indicates the lowest frequencies, green indicates the middle frequencies and blue the highest frequencies. Each dot is a galaxy, with around 300,000 radio galaxies observed as part of the GLEAM survey. Natasha Hurley-Walker (Curtin / ICRAR) and the GLEAM Team

What the universe looks like when viewed with radio eyes

To the naked eye the universe we can see on a clear night is dotted with thousands of stars. See through radio eyes, then things look very different.
Jets generated by supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies can transport huge amounts of energy across great distances. REUTERS/X-ray: NASA/CXC/Tokyo Institute of Technology/J.Kataoka et al

Radio galaxies: the mysterious, secretive “beasts” of the Universe

It’s difficult to get jets - powerful, lightning fast particles - to give up their secrets. The new Square Kilometre Array radio telescope could hold the key to solving jets’ mysteries.

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