stars

Supercomputers bring theory to life

Over aeons of time cosmic gas comes together, stars begin to form, supernovae explode, galaxies collide. And computational astronomers can watch it all unfold inside a supercomputer. That’s the kind of work post-doctoral fellows Rob Crain and Greg Poole are doing at the Swinburne Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing.

Read the full article →

Mega star nursery gives birth to new knowledge

Enormous collapsing clouds of cosmic gas and dust may yield clues on how massive stars form, which is an enduring mystery of astronomy. One such cloud, called BYF73, has been studied by a research team using CSIRO’s Mopra radio telescope. Peter Barnes, an Australian researcher working at the University of Florida in the US, leads [...]

Read the full article →

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.

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

The destruction of a star

You have to be well prepared, quick and lucky to take a picture of an explosion, especially if that explosion occurred 11 billion years ago in a remote part of the Universe. Having the right equipment, plus friends in high places, certainly helps. And that’s exactly what the Zadko Telescope—managed by the University of Western [...]

Read the full article →

Is the Red Rectangle a cosmic Rosetta Stone?

Cracking the puzzle of unusual molecules in deep space that absorb some wavelengths of starlight is like unlocking the secrets of the Rosetta Stone, according to Rob Sharp of the Australian National University’s Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. “It’s the longest-standing problem in astronomical spectroscopy,” he says. The identity of the molecules has been [...]

Read the full article →

Starquakes reveal family secrets

Stars forming in clusters from a single galactic dust cloud are not as similar to one another as previously thought, according to an international team of astronomers who analysed ‘starquakes’ from just three months of data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope. And there is at least another four years’ data to come. “In the past, [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

Seeing a beach ball on the moon

When the present upgrade is complete, the Sydney University Stellar Interferometer (SUSI) will be able to resolve objects the size of a beach ball on the Moon, says Mike Ireland of Macquarie University in Sydney. This large interferometer will be used to determine the dimensions—size, weight and velocity—of pulsating stars, hot stars, and massive stars. [...]

Read the full article →