milky way

Alice Springs—gateway to the stars

Scientists are using the unique advantages of Australia’s Red Centre to conduct high-altitude balloon flights for astronomical research. The clear air and low population of central Australia make it the ideal location for balloon-based research. For most types of astronomy, observatories are typically built high on the tops of mountains, far out in space or [...]

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Stellar immigration

Immigration is a billion year old issue, it seems. Over the past few billion years about a quarter of the globular star clusters in our galaxy-tens of millions of stars-formed elsewhere, and moved into the Milky Way.

So say Prof Duncan Forbes of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne and his Canadian colleague Prof Terry Bridges who used Hubble Space Telescope data to identify the alien stars by the fact that their age and chemical composition differed from their neighbours.

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Profiling and fingerprinting the stars

This story continues from Galactic archaeology— digging into the Milky Way’s past But already, another Australian-led innovation in astronomical instrumentation is providing researchers with the critical information they need to understand the motions of stars within different parts of our galaxy, such as its main body, the bulging core, and the extended halo that surrounds [...]

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Galactic archaeology— digging into the Milky Way’s past

Ken Freeman is hunting for fossils. But he’s not looking for old bones—he’s exploring the very origin and history of our Milky Way galaxy. Conventional theory says that our galaxy grew big by engulfing smaller ones. If this is correct, stars from the original galaxies should be still identifiable within the main mass of stars [...]

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Bringing dark corners of the Universe to light

Using the Gemini South telescope in Chile, a team of astronomers led by Joss Bland-Hawthorn of the University of Sydney revealed the faint, outer regions of the galaxy called NGC 300, showing that the galaxy is at least twice the size as thought previously. The findings suggest that our own Milky Way galaxy could also [...]

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