Astronomers have indirectly spotted some of the first stars in the universe by making their most distant detection of oxygen in a galaxy that existed just 500m years after the Big Bang.
Academic rigor, journalistic flair
Articles on Star formation
Displaying 1 - 20 of 21 articles
A three-dimensional look and listen at a dark cloud in space sheds new light on the mystery of how our solar system formed billions of years ago.
As galaxies get older they get rounder, and fall victim to the middle-aged spread that catches many of us humans here on Earth.
Massive, far distant galaxies contain 100 times more gas than we thought possible.
The science of red skies can also help us understand how stars form.
It's like one great big distillery up there.
Astronomers are surprised by what they're finding out about galaxies that formed in the early days of our universe, now that sensitive telescopes allow direct observation, not the inference of old.
Understanding how the billions of stars in our galaxy formed and evolved is the subject of a huge galactic archaeology project.
Galaxies are supposed to be the place where new stars are formed. So what causes some to stop this stellar production line?
Extragalactic astrophysicists want to know how and why galaxies stop forming stars, change their shape and fade away. With help from citizen scientists, they're figuring it out.
Astronomers have built a new observatory in the cold dry air of a high plateau in Antarctica to peer through our atmosphere and observe carbon in our galaxy.
If some of the laws of physics were only infinitesimally different, we would simply not exist. It almost looks like the universe itself was built for life. But how can that be?
They're are the overachievers of the universe: incredibly dense but very small when compared to others stars. So how much do we know about the extreme behaviour of neutron stars?
Our universe's most exciting days are well behind us, with new research showing the universe is now slowly but surely dying.
Researchers have created a star-forming cloud in the laboratory to try to recreate the first-ever biological molecule. The study could explain why such molecules are left-handed.
What happens to a galaxy when it runs out of the stuff needed to forge new stars?
A detailed study of comets orbiting the young nearby star Beta Pictoris is published today in the journal Nature, and it reveals striking similarities to the comets found in our solar system. Over the…
Clusters of galaxies have back-stories worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster: their existences are marked by violence, death and birth, arising after extragalactic pile-ups where groups of galaxies crashed…
What makes our sun shine has been a mystery for most of human history. Given our sun is a star and stars are suns, explaining the source of the sun’s energy would help us understand why stars shine. An…
A piece of the galaxy formation puzzle may have fallen into place, thanks to a team of European and American astronomers peering into the depths of our early universe. According to new research published…
Top contributors
-
Professor (Astrophysics), University of Southern Queensland
-
Associate Professor, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)
-
Tanya Hill is a Friend of The Conversation.
Honorary Fellow of the University of Melbourne and Senior Curator (Astronomy), Museums Victoria
-
Associate professor in astronomy, Monash University
-
Professor of Astrophysics, University of Sydney
-
Head of Education and Public Outreach LSST, Australian Astronomical Observatory
-
PhD; Senior Lecturer in Astrophysics, Monash University
-
Professor in Physics and Astronomy, UNSW
-
Senior Lecturer in Physics, University of Hull
-
Professor (Physics), University of Southern Queensland
-
Postdoctoral fellow, UNSW
-
Astrophysicist, University of Melbourne
-
Senior Lecturer in Radio Astronomy, Curtin University
-
Lecturer in Astronomy, Nottingham Trent University
-
Future Fellow, Australian Astronomical Observatory
