Astronomers find regular rhythms among pulsating stars
Through the noise, young stars reveal their inner workings An Australian-led team has solved the mystery of how some rapidly rotating young stars pulsate. Delta Scuti stars can now be studied in more detail thanks to the work of Professor Tim Bedding and colleagues. By listening to the beating hearts of stars, astronomers have for …
Galaxy’s arms elbow stars into our neighbourhood
Many stars that now live near the Sun were born somewhere else in the Galaxy. Astronomers have just worked out how these migrants reached their new homes and what set them travelling – important details of our Galaxy’s story.
An explosion at the centre of our Galaxy
A new study led by SIfA professor Joss Bland-Hawthorn shows evidence that a huge explosion occurred at the centre of our Galaxy. This explosion was so powerful that it could only have come from one thing: the supermassive black hole today lying dormant in the middle of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*. “The black hole, of course, …
The Cannibal Next Door
SIfA Professor Geraint Lewis and his international team, including with SIfA PhD students Zhen Wen, have unravelled the cannibalistic past of the Andromeda galaxy. This study, published in Nature, analysed globular cluster data from the Pan-Andromeda Archaeological Survey (PAndAS) to reconstruct the times when Andromeda devoured small galaxies to grow its stellar halo. “By tracing the …
Tiny star behaves like both a sun and a planet
A well-known star is behaving somewhat like a planet, a SIfA-led team has found. PhD candidate Andrew Zic and his collaborators have discovered pulsed radio emission from UV Ceti, a dwarf star with a mass just a tenth of the Sun’s. The emission has a characteristic that until recently has only been seen in radio …
AI now detecting Fast Radio Bursts in real-time
A Swinburne PhD student has built an automated system featuring artificial intelligence (AI) to detect and capture the details of fast radio bursts in real time. Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are mysterious and powerful flashes of radio waves from space, thought to originate billions of light years from the Earth. They last for only a …