X-ray flares from the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way may be caused by the regular vaporisation of…
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Articles on Cosmology
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The Nobel Lecture of physics laureate Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University has been placed online. A video of Professor Schmidt’s lecture, “The Path to Measuring an Accelerating Universe…
Black holes have long been the staple of science fiction, being monstrous beasts with a gravitational pull that prevents even light from escaping. As well as being useful plot devices, offering mechanisms…
On Monday, to much fanfare, astronomers working with the Kepler space observatory (which was launched in March 2009) announced their first discovery of a planet orbiting within the “habitable zone” of…
Peruse the astrophysical literature and you could be forgiven for thinking black holes exist. But do they really? What makes a black hole special is its event horizon: a no-return gateway to an unknowable…
Two additional dwarf galaxies that appear to be satellites of Andromeda, the closest spiral galaxy to Earth, have been discovered…
What do black holes eat? And do supermassive black holes have fiercer appetites? Let’s remind ourselves of the facts. Lurking at the centre of the Milky Way is a monster, a giant black hole with a mass…
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…
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…
“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…
The innermost parts of a black hole’s active jets have been revealed for the first time. The observation, by NASA scientists…
It’s one of the most famous and evocative images in cinematic history – Luke Skywalker gazing out at the twin suns of Tatooine as they set, in the original Star Wars movie, A New Hope. Such a view would…
Welcome to Peer Review, a series in which we ask leading academics to review books written by people working in the same field. Here Geraint Lewis, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Sydney…
Just how big are the stars? Earth feels quite big, what with it taking an entire day to fly between Sydney and London, and clearly the sun and moon are quite large in the sky. But with virtually everything…
The expansion rate of the universe has been measured to a greater degree of accuracy than ever before. The rate of expansion…
In questioning the fundamental nature of the universe, cosmology regularly grabs the public’s attention. But in an era in which we are observing deeper and more widely than ever before, our knowledge of…
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Professor of Astrophysics, University of Sydney
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Pro Vice-Chancellor Flagship Initiatives, Swinburne University of Technology
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Associate Professor in Astronomy, Monash University
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Reader in Astrophysics, UCL
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John Curtin Distinguished Professor (Radio Astronomy), Curtin University
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Professor (Astrophysics), University of Southern Queensland
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Cosmologist, University of Tasmania
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Professor in Theoretical Physics, University of Southampton
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Emeritus Professor, ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery, OzGrav, The University of Western Australia
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ARC Laureate Fellow, Swinburne University of Technology
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Australian Government Women in STEM Ambassador, Professor of Practice, UNSW Sydney
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Professor, The University of Queensland
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Researcher at Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics and the Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University
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Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics, University of Cambridge
