We are living in an era of science denial. An era when well-established facts are disputed, fake experts are interviewed by the media and blog posts trump science papers. It’s an era of vaccine denial…
Articles on Cosmology
Displaying 141 - 160 of 168 articles
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope has been on the cards since the early 1990s. It took until May of last year to find out where it will be built – in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand…
As 2012 comes to a close and you toast the New Year, be sure to also raise a glass to one Vesto Melvin Slipher. My intent is to describe what Slipher did 100 years ago in Flagstaff, Arizona and why this…
If you believe the hype, the end of the world has finally come. The Mayan calendar’s “long count” began on 13 August 3114 BCE and will end today on 21 December 2012. Why do people believe the world will…
As a cosmologist, I often carry around a universe or two in my pocket. Not entire, infinitely large universes, but maybe a few billion light years or so across. Enough to be interesting. Of course, these…
Today I’m annoyed at Facebook. Among the amazingly witty and touching postings from my friends and Amnesty International are “pages you might like” and advertisements for things I don’t need, especially…
Today, after several years of design and construction, CSIRO’s Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) is officially open. The A$140m facility, built in the remote Murchison Shire of Western…
Earlier this week, headlines in several major newspapers screamed: “Melbourne researchers rewrite Big Bang theory”. You might think this is a reference to a new script for a popular TV show, but as a cosmologist…
Last week’s Global Atheist Convention and debates between prominent atheists and theologians in the Australian media has seen arguments about the existence of God getting a thorough airing. In my view…
Atoms cooled to extremely low temperatures have been observed entering a rare state called “quantum criticality”. Physicists…
A new University of Western Australia supercomputer that is 10,000 times faster than the average office PC could help scientists to develop the data processing capacity for the world’s largest telescope…
X-ray flares from the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way may be caused by the regular vaporisation of…
The Nobel Lecture of physics laureate Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University has been placed online. A video of Professor Schmidt’s lecture, “The Path to Measuring an Accelerating Universe…
Black holes have long been the staple of science fiction, being monstrous beasts with a gravitational pull that prevents even light from escaping. As well as being useful plot devices, offering mechanisms…
On Monday, to much fanfare, astronomers working with the Kepler space observatory (which was launched in March 2009) announced their first discovery of a planet orbiting within the “habitable zone” of…
Peruse the astrophysical literature and you could be forgiven for thinking black holes exist. But do they really? What makes a black hole special is its event horizon: a no-return gateway to an unknowable…
Two additional dwarf galaxies that appear to be satellites of Andromeda, the closest spiral galaxy to Earth, have been discovered…
What do black holes eat? And do supermassive black holes have fiercer appetites? Let’s remind ourselves of the facts. Lurking at the centre of the Milky Way is a monster, a giant black hole with a mass…
A radical discovery by my colleagues and I – reported this week in Physical Review Letters – could help explain why it was possible for life (at least as we know it) to develop on Earth, but not in other…
Let’s talk numbers for a moment. The moon is approximately 384,000 kilometres away, and the sun is approximately 150 million kilometres away. The mean distance between Earth and the sun is known as the…
Top contributors
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Professor of Astrophysics, University of Sydney
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Pro Vice-Chancellor Flagship Initiatives, Swinburne University of Technology
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Associate Professor in Astronomy, Monash University
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Reader in Astrophysics, UCL
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Lecturer and ARC DECRA Fellow, Queensland University of Technology
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Cosmologist, University of Tasmania
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John Curtin Distinguished Professor (Radio Astronomy), Curtin University
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Professor (Astrophysics), University of Southern Queensland
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Associate Professor in Archaeology and Space Studies, Flinders University
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Pro-vice-chancellor, Professor, University of Birmingham
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Australian Government Women in STEM Ambassador, Professor of Practice, UNSW
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Emeritus Professor, ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery, OzGrav, The University of Western Australia
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Researcher at Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics and the Research School of Earth Sciences, Australian National University
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ARC Laureate Fellow, Swinburne University of Technology
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Head of Research Data & Software, Macquarie University