Australian-led GALAH project releases the chemical fingerprints for almost 1,000,000 stars on the 50th birthday of the AAT, Australia’s largest optical telescope. Australian scientists have released data from a massive, stellar mapping survey that has analysed nearly 1 million stars in the Milky Way. The data will form the basis for decades of research into…
Embargo: 7 pm AEDT, Friday 6 September 2024 (10 am, London time, 05:00 US Eastern Time) The inside story of a galaxy’s long reach into space A shroud of gas stretches up to a million light years around every galaxy and is its first interaction with the wider Universe beyond. For the first time scientists…
Stars and dark matter are not interacting in ‘impossible ways’ A longstanding ‘conspiracy’ in astronomy – that stars and dark matter are interacting in inexplicable ways – has been overturned by an international team of astronomers, in a paper today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS). The authors are based in Australia, the UK,…
An international team led by Australian research centre ASTRO 3D reports that age is the driving force in changing how stars move within galaxies. Galaxies start life with their stars rotating in an orderly pattern but in some the motion of stars is more random. Until now, scientists have been uncertain about what causes this…
At least one in a dozen stars show evidence of planetary ingestion according to a paper published in Nature today. The international research team studied twin stars that should have identical composition. But, in about eight percent of cases, they differ, perplexing astronomers. The team, led by ASTRO 3D researchers has found that the difference…
Galaxies and stars developed faster after the Big Bang than expected Detailed pictures of one of the very first galaxies show growth was much faster than we thought An international research team have made unprecedentedly detailed observations of the earliest merger of galaxies ever witnessed. They suggest stars developed much faster and more efficiently than…
… all while discovering how the Universe evolved, how galaxies form and where the elements come from. Around the world, research agencies are struggling to achieve gender parity. A paper published in Nature Astronomy today reports how a national Australian astronomy centre achieved equal numbers of women and men using science.
New images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have helped Australian astronomers unlock secrets of how infant galaxies started an explosion of star formation in the very early Universe. Some early galaxies were abundant with a gas that glowed so bright it outshone emerging stars. In research published today, astronomers have now discovered just…
Precise mapping of temperature variation gives clue to its evolution A team of astronomers led by ASTRO 3D has drawn a temperature map of the dust drifting within one of the oldest spiral galaxies of the Universe which provides new insights into how fast the galaxy is growing. Until now researchers have only been able…
New evidence for rapid heating in the early universe Astrophysicists in Australia have shed new light on the state of the universe 13 billion years ago by measuring the density of carbon in the gases surrounding ancient galaxies. The study adds another piece to the puzzle of the history of the universe. “We found that…