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…
Collectively, these dishes would have the power to detect signals from the earliest years of the universe.
AAP/West Australian Government
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…
Two "new" black holes, in relatively nearby galaxies, are the largest ever found.
tsand
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…
What's so special about the latest big discovery by NASA's Kepler?
NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech
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…
"Infinite" is where we get to when we reach the limits of our understanding.
truly0utrageous
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…
Most galaxies – including ours – host a hungry monster.
allthecolours
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…
If the signs are right, fundamental equations of cosmology may need altering.
waljoris
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…
We know the universe is vast, but how do we measure the distances between things?
Dave Scrimshaw.
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…
Finding quasars will help us understand how galaxies were formed.
NASA
Today, the University of Melbourne’s Professor Stuart Wyithe was awarded the 2011 Malcolm McIntosh Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year for his work on the origin of galaxies.
The multi-award winning…
Stars are immense, but the space between them is truly phenomenal.
chefranden
“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
Douglas Adams…
A would-be Jedi waits for Kepler in a galaxy far, far away.
It’s one of the most famous and evocative images in cinematic history – Luke Skywalker gazing out at the twin suns of Tatooine as they set, in the original Star Wars movie, A New Hope.
Such a view would…
A universe composed differently could still support complex life.
Susan NYC
Welcome to Peer Review, a series in which we ask leading academics to review books written by people working in the same field.
Here Geraint Lewis, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Sydney…
Warning: you may struggle to believe what you're about to read.
Bluedharma
Just how big are the stars?
Earth feels quite big, what with it taking an entire day to fly between Sydney and London, and clearly the sun and moon are quite large in the sky.
But with virtually everything…
The universe teems with energy and matter we don't understand.
stuant63/Flickr
In questioning the fundamental nature of the universe, cosmology regularly grabs the public’s attention.
But in an era in which we are observing deeper and more widely than ever before, our knowledge…
