We’ve detected a star barely hotter than a pizza oven – the coldest ever found to emit radio waves

Congrats to Kovi Rose whose recent paper got some good media coverage We have identified the coldest star ever found to produce radio waves – a brown dwarf too small to…
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We’ve detected a star barely hotter than a pizza oven – the coldest ever found to emit radio waves

A long-period radio transient active for three decades

Congratulations to Manisha who was part of a recent paper published in Nature this month:  This object belongs to a new class of radio transients of which only 3 are now…
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A long-period radio transient active for three decades

Bringing artificial intelligence to the search for habitable planets

University partners with Spiral Blue for the TOLIMAN space telescope mission A team led by astronomer Professor Peter Tuthill at the University of Sydney has announced a partnership with Sydney-based…
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Bringing artificial intelligence to the search for habitable planets

Research.com rankings – Joss #1 in Australia

 Research.com, a leading academic platform for researchers, has just released the 2023 Edition Ranking of Best Scientists in the field of Physics. Congratulations to Joss Bland-Hawthorn who ranked #204 in the…
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Research.com rankings – Joss #1 in Australia

From platypus to parsecs and milliCrab: why do astronomers use such weird units?

You may have heard about an asteroid set to fly near Earth that is the size of 18 platypus, or maybe the one that’s the size of 33 armadillos, or even one the…
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From platypus to parsecs and milliCrab: why do astronomers use such weird units?

Dark Side of the Universe

Documentary The Dark Side Of The Universe airs on ABC TV Amazing things happen every day. Despite this, the sum total of our sense impressions is only 5% of the…
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Dark Side of the Universe

News

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

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

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

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 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

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