Australian-led GALAH project releases chemical information for 600,000 stars. How do stars destroy lithium? Was a drastic change in the shape of the Milky Way caused by the sudden arrival of millions of stellar stowaways? These are just a couple of the astronomical questions likely to be answered following the

Continue reading Playing detective on a galactic scale: huge new dataset will solve multiple Milky Way mysteries

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

Continue reading Astronomers find regular rhythms among pulsating stars

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.

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*.

Continue reading An explosion at the centre of our Galaxy

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

Continue reading The Cannibal Next Door

SIfA PhD candidate Andrew Zic 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

Continue reading Tiny star behaves like both a sun and a planet

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.

Continue reading AI now detecting Fast Radio Bursts in real-time​