There’s a monster lurking in the heart of our galaxy, and we may get our first glimpses of it tonight. At 11pm AEST, an international team of scientists will reveal what they’re calling a “groundbreaking” discovery from our galactic centre — and you’ll be able to watch it live. This image,…

When a star explodes and dies in a supernova, it takes on a new life of sorts. Pulsars are the extremely rapidly rotating objects left over after massive stars have exhausted their fuel supply. They are extremely dense, with a mass similar to the Sun crammed into a region the…

Could life survive around the nearest stars? In collaboration with the Breakthrough Initiative, Saber Astronautics and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Professor Peter Tuthill is leading TOLIMAN, a project to discover if the nearest stars have planets that could support life. A simulated view of the Alpha Centauri binary through the…

The timescales in which star-forming galaxies deplete their gas is found to be short relative to the age of the Universe. This points to the conclusion that galaxies must have a way to replenish their gas reservoirs and indeed, early cosmological simulations reveal cold gas being channeled along dark matter…

In early 2020, we detected an unusual radio signal coming from somewhere near the centre of our galaxy. The signal blinked on and off, growing 100 times brighter and dimmer over time. What’s more, the radio waves in the signal had an uncommon “circular polarisation”, which means the electric field in the…

Researchers have created a model of the evolution of the Milky Way which explains how key chemical distributions in the galaxy’s stars came to be. One of the biggest questions in astronomy is related to how our home galaxy, the Milky Way, came to be in its current state. Whilst…