It takes more than 9½ years for a spacecraft to travel the 5.7 billion kilometres to Pluto. But when the New Horizons mission finally passes the dwarf planet in 2015, Australia will play a pivotal role. An official from the US space agency NASA has confirmed plans to build two new dish antennae at Tidbi...
Nullarbor region once full of fast-flowing rivers University of Adelaide geologists have shed new light on the origin of Australia's largest delta, the Ceduna Delta, and the river systems which drained the continent millions of years before the Murray-Darling system came into existence. It has...
New evidence indicates auroras occur outside our solar system University of Leicester planetary scientists have found new evidence suggesting auroras - similar to Earth's Aurora Borealis - occur on bodies outside our solar system. Auroras occur on several planets within our solar system, and t...
Title: The subdwarf B star SB 290 - A fast rotator on the extreme horizontal branch Authors: S. Geier, U. Heber, C. Heuser, L. Classen, S. J. O'Toole, H. Edelmann Hot subdwarf B stars (sdBs) are evolved core helium-burning stars with very thin hydrogen envelopes. In order to form an sdB, the progenito...
South Korea makes billion-dollar bet on fusion power South Korea has embarked on the development of a preliminary concept design for a fusion power demonstration reactor in collaboration with the US Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) in New Jersey. The project is...
The Parkes radio telescope, is one of the biggest in the southern hemisphere. It was completed in 1961 and has operated almost continuously to the present day.
The movie "The Dish" starring Sam Neill was based on the Parkes telescope's key role in the Apollo 11 Moon landing.
It has a dish o...
Title: The enigmatic young brown dwarf binary FU Tau: accretion and activity Authors: B. Stelzer, A. Scholz, C. Argiroffi, G. Micela FU Tau belongs to a rare class of young, wide brown dwarf binaries. We have resolved the system in a Chandra X-ray observation and detected only the primary, FU Tau A. H...
Title: The planetary nebula Abell 48 and its [WN4] central star Authors: I. S. Bojicic, D. J. Frew, Q. A. Parker, M. Stupar, S. Wachter, K. DePew We have conducted a multi-wavelength study of the planetary nebula Abell 48 and give a revised classification of its nucleus as a hydrogen-deficient star o...
On 22 January 1879 a British battalion was massacred by Zulu warriors during the Zulu War in South Africa. At 2:29 PM there was a solar eclipse. The conflict was named the Battle of Isandlwana, the Zulu name for the battle translates as "the day of the dead moon" Read more
Grigory Samuilovich Landsberg (January 22, 1890, Vologda - February 2, 1957, Moscow) was a Soviet physicist. Grigory S. Landsberg is a co-discoverer of inelastic combinatorial scattering of light used now in Raman spectroscopy. Read more
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. have announced that the launch date for the H-IIB Launch Vehicle No. 2 (H-IIB F2) with the H-II Transfer Vehicle 2 (HTV2) cargo transporter to the International Space Station, from the Yoshinobu Launch Complex a...
Apollo 5 was the first unmanned flight of the Apollo Lunar Module, which would later carry astronauts to the lunar surface. It lifted off on January 22, 1968 with a Saturn IB rocket. Read more
A new type of volcanic eruption Scientists based in the UK and New Zealand have described a "new" type of volcanic eruption. Volcanic eruptions are commonly categorised as either explosive or effusive. But now, in research published this month in Nature Geoscience, researchers at Vic...