Free Astronomy Public Lectures
89 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 1 year ago - ★★★★★ - 6 ratingsEach month, from February to November, the Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing presents a free public lecture at the Hawthorn campus of Swinburne University of Technology.
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Episodes
Unlocking the Universe's Secrets with James Webb Space Telescope (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
November 19, 2022 04:31 - 58 minutes - 79.9 MBThis is a special State of the Universe lecture for National Science Week in August 2022. Presented by the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing (CAS) at Swinburne University of Technology. Successfully launched on 25 December 2021, NASA’s successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has taken its first images and will be released to the public 12 July. Join Professor Karl Glazebrook, Dr Themiya Nanayakkara and Dr Colin Jacobs, as they discuss these imag...
Australia's growing role in the global space industry (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
September 30, 2022 05:32 - 52 minutes - 72.1 MBIn astronomy, we use cutting edge instruments and techniques to learn more about our Universe. But what about turning that focus back to Earth? More and more of our daily activities depend on space and it provides a unique perspective of our planet. In this talk, Dr Rebecca Allen (Swinburne University of Technology) will discuss Australia's growing role in the global space industry and how we are using our astronomy knowledge to drive cutting-edge research for Earth. Presented 30 September 2022.
A Flash of Discovery (Free Astronomy Public Lecture)
August 17, 2022 05:26 - 58 minutes - 79.9 MBBehind the serenity of the night sky, hides an ever-changing Universe of brilliant explosions. Join us online for an interactive lecture uncovering the State of the Transient Universe with Dr Jielai Zhang as part of National Science Week 2020.
Friendly stars and where to find them (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
April 22, 2022 05:28 - 58 minutes - 80.7 MBMost of our understanding of stars and how they evolve is based on the assumption that they are completely isolated in space, never interacting with one another. However, studies over the last decade have shown that many more stars than we thought exist in gravitationally-bound binaries, triples, and even larger groupings. The addition of companions increases the complexity in the systems, but also opens up the possibility for interactions between the stars and the formation of unusual astron...
Exploring Einstein's Universe with Neutron Stars, Black Holes and Gravitational Waves (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
October 19, 2021 04:27 - 1 hour - 102 MBEinstein dreamt of a Universe in which space and time were curved by matter, and how black holes would represent the ultimate manifestations of his physics, and the possibility of a new type of radiation - gravitational waves. Sadly he died before the discovery of black holes and neutron stars, and so he was unable to witness many of the dramatic experimental confirmations of his theory. In this lecture the Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), P...
The Dark Universe (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
February 28, 2020 04:40 - 1 hour - 104 MBPresented by Sara Webb and Grace Lawrence on Friday 28 February 2020. When we look to the stars, what we see is a fraction of the universe – only around 5%. Astronomers observe that a mysterious ‘dark universe’ of strange and enigmatic dark energy and dark matter makes up the remaining 95%. Swinburne PhD candidates Sara Webb and Grace Lawrence are working to unravel the mysteries of this dark universe, exploring the fundamental origins and nature of dark energy and dark matter.
Truth and awe in astronomy (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
December 18, 2019 23:36 - 40 minutes - 55.6 MBPresented by Professor Sheila Kannappan on Monday 16 December 2019. Since ancient times, humans have been drawn to understand the heavens while at the same time observing them with a spiritual sense of wonder. In this talk Professor Kannappan will trace the dual power of truth and awe in the history of astronomy and in our modern world.
The unintended humour of the Universe (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
November 28, 2019 23:35 - 54 minutes - 75.2 MBPresented by Dr Tiantian Yuan on 29th November 2019. Scientific research is not only fun but also funny. In this end of the year talk, Tiantian Yuan explains how the universe makes us laugh and think.
The Cosmic Perspective (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
October 17, 2019 23:34 - 53 minutes - 73.8 MBPresented by Dr Edward (Ned) Taylor on Friday 18 October 2019. At its most basic, astronomy is an attempt to understand the nature of the universe in which we find ourselves. As such, understandings of astronomy have always had a profound impact on how we conceive of and understand ourselves — as a society, if not as individuals. In this talk, I want to share my 'cosmic perspective’: some of the lessons from modern astronomy and astrophysics that I carry with me into my daily life, and how my...
The Never-Ending Story of a Star (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
September 20, 2019 00:31 - 1 hour - 60.4 MBPresented by Renee Spiewak on Friday 20 September 2019. Like humans, stars often live their long lives in pairs, called binaries. At the end of their lives, they experience drastic transformations, rather than simply ending, and these transformations greatly affect their companions. In this lecture, I will take you on a journey of the many lives (and spectacular deaths/rebirths) of a massive star with a lighter companion star. The mass of a star, among other factors, determines the path it ta...
Space law - It's not rocket science (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
July 19, 2019 01:42 - 53 minutes - 50.1 MBPresented by Kim Ellis on Friday, 19 July 2019. This will be an informative lecture on how Australia is making a splash on the international space arena as the Australian Space Agency turns one. We will also be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the moon landing.
The vivid lives of stars (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
June 21, 2019 01:47 - 57 minutes - 53.6 MBPresented by Poojan Agrawal on the 21st June 2019. Beyond the twinkling dots in the night sky, there are all sorts of stars that are beautiful and fascinating their own sense. I will share the story of how we came to understand these stars as we know them today using the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram and the importance of the lives of these stars in the present-day astrophysical problems.
Watching a Little Gas Cloud on its Way into the Galactic Supermassive Black Hole (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
March 29, 2019 05:47 - 1 hour - 87.8 MBPresented by Prof. Andreas Burkert on 29th March 2019. The Galactic Center is one of the most fascinating and extreme places in the Milky Way. Harboring a supermassive black hole with a mass of order four million solar masses, it experiences cycles of activity and star formation, separated by periods of quiescence that last of order a million years. The Milky Way’s supermassive black hole currently is inactive. However a small, diffuse gas cloud (G2) has recently been detected on an orbit alm...
Things that go bump in the night: fast radio bursts and the search for life beyond Earth (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
February 21, 2019 23:53 - 49 minutes - 45.3 MBPresented by Dr Daniel C Price on 22nd February 2019. Thanks to new, more powerful technology, astronomers can search the skies faster and with more resolution than ever before. In this public lecture, I will talk about two exciting fields in astronomy: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), and Fast Radio Bursts. The SETI field has been reinvigorated by the 10-year, $100M Breakthrough Listen initiative to search for intelligent life beyond Earth. As a project scientist for Brea...
Breakthrough! The detection of gravitational waves from a neutron star merger (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
November 26, 2018 03:04 - 54 minutes - 56 MBPresented by Assoc. Prof. Tara Murphy on 23 November 2018. On August 17th 2017 the LIGO-Virgo interferometer detected gravitational waves from a neutron star merger in a galaxy 130 million light years away. This was a breakthrough for physics and astronomy. What followed was a frenzy of activity as astronomers around the world worked to detect electromagnetic radiation with conventional telescopes. After this unprecedented effort the event was detected in gamma-rays, x-rays, visible light and...
The rapidly growing world of Indigenous astronomy (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
November 20, 2018 23:41 - 1 hour - 65 MBPresented by Dr Duane Hamacher and Krystal De Napoli on 1st June 2018. The subject of Indigenous astronomy has skyrocketed in recent years all around the globe. A constant stream of emerging research is changing what we think we know about Aboriginal knowledge systems in Australia and the number of Aboriginal students studying astrophysics is rapidly growing. This lecture will introduce you to one of these students, Kamilaroi woman and astrophysics student Krystal De Napoli, and the research ...
Hidden Features: Discovery space in a reluctant Universe (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
October 18, 2018 23:51 - 59 minutes - 60.4 MBPresented on 19 October 2018 by Dr Michelle Cluver. The more we learn about the universe, the mosre it tends to surprise us. This is one of the most exciting aspects of science - making unexpected discoveries! In this talk I will present some recent scientific discoveries I have been involved with and discuss why these and other discoveries have us so excited about the Square Kilometre Array Pathfinders, MeerKAT and ASKAP.
Deeper, Wider, Faster: Chasing the fastest bursts in the Universe (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
June 11, 2018 00:54 - 1 hour - 66.9 MBPresented by Assoc. Prof. Jeff Cooke on 11 May 2018. When you look up a the night sky, it appears static and unchanging. However, a closer look using telescopes finds it to be wildly violent. Objects explode, erupt and burst on all time scales, from millions of years to months to milliseconds. Many of these events have been studies in great detail but the fastest have been the most difficult to catch largely because of the technological limitations. This presentation will discuss these fast...
Cosmic mirages: seeing dark matter with gravitational lenses (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
March 15, 2018 13:00 - 56 minutes - 58.3 MBPresented by Prof. Mike Hudson on 16th March 2018. Most of the matter in the Universe is dark matter: an elusive particle that is completely invisible. But we can “see” this matter by studying how it distorts the light from galaxies in the distant Universe, a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. I will give a whirlwind tour of gravitational lensing’s “greatest hits” showing how it can be used as a tool to understand some of the most mysterious things in the Universe: from black holes to t...
The fast radio burst mystery (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
February 08, 2018 13:00 - 1 hour - 58.5 MBPresented by Dr Emily Petroff on 9 February 2018. Most things in the universe happen over millions or even billions of years but some things change on the timescales of human life and can be seen to change in a matter of months, days, or even seconds. These sources are called transients and are some of the most extreme events in the Universe, things like the collapse of a dying star, or a collision of two massive objects. Humans have been observing astronomical transients for centuries, from...
Seeing double - Looking at the Universe with gravity's eyes (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
November 13, 2017 13:00 - 1 hour - 59.8 MBPresented by Dr Thomas E. Collett on Tuesday 14 November 2017. Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that light rays are bent when they travel past a massive object. In this talk, we will explore tests of this prediction and view some of the spectacular consequences of light bending: gravitational lenses. These gravitational lenses let us directly measure where the mass is in the Universe, and the results imply that the Universe is mostly made of an exotic substance called dark ma...
The most ancient spiral galaxies seen through nature's largest telescopes (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
September 28, 2017 14:00 - 54 minutes - 50.2 MBPresented by Dr Tiantian Yuan on Friday 29 September 2017. One of the most prominent features of galaxies today is the manifestation of elegant spiral arms. We live in a beautiful grand-design spiral galaxy called the Milky Way. Our Solar System, including the Earth and the only life that we know, lies within the Orion spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy. However, as we look back in time to the very early Universe, the frequency of spiral galaxies decreases dramatically. In fact, most galaxie...
The violent Universe: explosions, transient events, and gravitational waves (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
September 19, 2017 14:00 - 1 hour - 67.6 MBPresented by Igor Andreoni on Friday 20 October 2017. The ancients considered the Universe unchanging, and had a special name for the planets, which they regarded as “wanderers”. Any changes in the night sky were seen as portents of doom – and a reason to fear the Gods. The advent of modern astronomy means that we no longer fear changes in the night sky, indeed some of us make our living from them! In this lecture I will tell you the story of the modern transient sky, where stars live and di...
"When life got really big" - Tales from a rock whisperer (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
July 23, 2017 14:00 - 1 hour - 88.8 MBPresented by Prof. Patricia Vickers-Rich on Friday 7 July 2017. We have been plotting the history of life around the world and climate over more than 1 billion years. Tonight we will zero in on a time when the Earth's first animals came into the picture - at a time when the planet was in the grips of a massive glaciation, Snowball Earth - which is likely better named Slushball Earth.
Small, medium, large: what galaxy sizes reveal about their past (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
May 15, 2017 05:23 - 53 minutes - 49.1 MBPresented by Dr Rebecca Allen on Friday 12 May 2017. Galaxies are the largest structures of matter in our Universe. Our own Milky Way has been studied in glorious detail. We know it has billions of stars, around most of which planets are likely to be found. There is a super massive black hole at its center where anything that gets too close will be consumed. There are intricate dust lanes that obscure the main disk of the galaxy. There is the life-force of stars, hydrogen gas. Finally, there ...
The rocket science in everyday life in your backyard (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
April 26, 2017 00:11 - 1 hour - 56.9 MBPresented by Dr. Themiya Nanayakkara on 21st April 2017. Over the last century, our understanding of the Universe has grown by leaps and bounds whilst posing new questions and testing our very fundamental knowledge and understanding of things around us. To answer these profound questions, scientists are planning ever more ambitious projects driven by human curiosity, to explore the unknown and comprehend our place in the vast senseless space. The Australian federal government in 2016-17 prov...
Cosmology: from the Big Bang to the formation of atoms (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
March 28, 2017 00:52 - 53 minutes - 49 MBPresented by Assoc. Prof. Emma Ryan-Weber on 10 February 2017. The whole Universe was in a hot dense state, then nearly 14 billion years ago expansion started. Wait... is the Bang Bang true and how do we know? In this talk Associate Professor Emma Ryan-Weber from the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing will describe the observational evidence for Big Bang Cosmology and how it sets the initial conditions for every atom in the Universe. The talk is especially suitable for year 11 teache...
The world's largest radio telescope in your backyard (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
March 26, 2017 23:19 - 1 hour - 64.5 MBPresented by Dr. Tyler Bourke on 24th March 2017. Australia is part of an international effort to build the World's largest radio telescope, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). In fact, one of the two telescope arrays that make up the SKA will be built in the Western Australian outback near Murchison, about 800 km NNE of Perth, a remote area almost devoid of people, but already the location of two advanced radio telescopes. The other SKA telescope array will be in a similarly isolated location...
LIGO, gravitational waves and the new astronomy (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
January 08, 2017 13:00 - 1 hour - 66.8 MBOn September 14, 2015, gravitational waves from the merger of two black holes rippled through the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). The measurement of these ripples would ultimately lead to the first direct detection of gravitational waves, the first observation of a binary black hole, and the birth of an entirely new field of astronomy. In this talk, Dr Eric Thrane from Monash University, will trace the history of gravitational waves from Einstein to the LIGO detect...
Into the heart of darkness: supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies - 2016 (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
October 20, 2016 13:00 - 1 hour - 67.2 MBPresented by Prof. Darren Croton on 21 October 2016. Black holes are among the most bizarre objects predicted by Einstein's theory of General Relativity. Many people may not realise that our own galaxy hosts a supermassive black hole at its centre that is three million times more massive than our own Sun! In this talk Professor Darren Croton from the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing will discuss the physics of black holes and their formation, how they can grow to become so massive,...
Discovering the unexpected: Pulsars, fast radio bursts and aliens?
September 29, 2016 14:00 - 1 hour - 74.4 MBPresented by Prof. Matthew Bailes on 30 September 2016. Almost 50 years ago Jocelyn Bell built a new telescope with her supervisor Antony Hewish that had an unusual property: it had high time resolution. The radio sky was thought to only change on long timescales but this new telescope's ability to explore a different regime of phase space meant that it made one of the greatest discoveries in astronomy, that of pulsars. Pulsars are neutron stars, the collapsed cores of once-massive stars. The...
Life in the Universe - origins and discoveries (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
August 16, 2016 14:00 - 37 minutes - 34 MBPresented by on 22 July 2016 by Rebecca Allen. In the vast cold reaches of space life has been able to gain a foothold and flourish on at least one planet- ours. We know that water is critical to life, but we do not know how Earth got it. In this talk, we will first explore the ongoing search for the source of Earth's water. Next, we will talk about some of the exciting ways in which we are utilising our knowledge of life on this planet to search for and possibly identify life in other part...
Making darkness visible (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
August 15, 2016 14:00 - 48 minutes - 44.9 MBPresented on 17 June 2016 by Allan Duffy. In the last 50 years astronomers have come to realise that there exists an invisible type of mass in the Universe, outweighing all of the atoms in every star, planet and person five times over. It's responsible for holding the galaxy together, for making the galaxies form where they do in the cosmos and is our best guide to physics beyond the Higgs boson, aka the 'god' particle. Yet astronomers are no nearer to understanding its nature. Using a comb...
Heavy elements in Red Giant Stars (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
August 11, 2016 14:00 - 44 minutes - 41.3 MBPresented on 20 May 2016 by Amanda Karakas. Most of the elements in the periodic table heavier than hydrogen and helium were forged in stars. Through the combined studies of stellar spectroscopy, nuclear physics, geochemistry, and astrophysics, humans have been able to work out the origin of many of the chemical elements that naturally occur in our Solar System. We know for example that most of the oxygen in the air was forged in ancient supernova explosions, which are the end product of ve...
Cosmic cartography: making maps of the Universe (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
April 21, 2016 01:33 - 1 hour - 66.1 MBPresented on 15 April 2016 by Dr Elisabete da Cunha. Almost one hundred years ago, astronomer Edwin Hubble revolutionised our understanding of the Universe and our place in it when he discovered that it extends beyond the Milky Way. Since then, astronomers have identified millions of galaxies beyond our own, and developed sophisticated techniques to measure their distances and motions. In this talk, I will show how astronomers map the Universe using large surveys of galaxies, and how "cosmic...
Planets: From our Solar System to new Exoworlds (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
March 17, 2016 13:00 - 1 hour - 58.9 MBPresented on 18 March 2016 by Elodie Thilliez and Matthew Agnew. The Solar system is a remarkable place filled with wonderfully varied worlds. Travelling outwards from the sun we first encounter the hellish, rocky bodies of Mercury and Venus, continue to the cooler, water bearing world of Earth and our close neighbour Mars. Beyond the asteroid belt we hit the majestic gas giants of Jupiter and Saturn and continuing on our voyage we finally reach the cold ice giants of Uranus and Neptune. The...
Black hole binaries - a unique love story (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
February 17, 2016 13:00 - 1 hour - 87 MBPresented by Dr Pablo A. Rosado on 18th February 2016. One of the greatest scientific discoveries of all times was achieved last week: the first detection of gravitational waves, emitted by a black hole binary. This discovery follows decades of intense work, and opens a new window to the Universe. This talk, for scientists and for non-scientists, is about black hole binaries, and the dawn of gravitational wave astronomy. This talk is about the curious romance of Alice and Bob. Nobody has hea...
Exploring the universe with the world's largest radio telescope (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
December 03, 2015 13:00 - 1 hour - 76.4 MBPresented on 4 December 2015 by Dr Lisa Harvey-Smith. What is Dark Matter? How did the solar system form? Was Einstein right about the nature of gravity? Are we alone in the universe? To tackle these fascinating questions and more, an international consortium of eleven nations is currently designing the 'Square Kilometre Array' (SKA) telescope. Comprising thousands of radio receivers located in Africa and Australia, the SKA will be the world's most powerful radio telescope. It will revoluti...
Tune into the skies: how to do cosmology in the radio (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
October 22, 2015 13:00 - 59 minutes - 54.3 MBPresented by Dr Laura Wolz on Friday 23 October 2015. Radio telescopes have made numerous appearances in media and films due to their huge, mechanical appearances contrasting with the natural background. The gigantic size of the dishes are essential for observing cosmic objects in high resolution following the basic rule: the longer the wavelength, the bigger the dish. The construction efforts are worthwhile because radio waves can pass our atmosphere nearly unobscured and thus allow us to ...
New windows into the Universe : From cosmic dawn to today (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
October 08, 2015 13:00 - 1 hour - 63.8 MBPresented by Associate Professor Kim-Vy Tran on Friday 9 October 2015. Since Galileo's time, our ability to study the universe has been driven by our ability to collect light from distant objects. Due to tremendous technological advances in the last few decades, we can now study the most distant galaxies known in the universe. In addition to seeing fainter objects at higher resolution, we can also view the universe at many different wavelengths ranging from gamma rays to radio waves. I highl...
Putting immunity under the microscope (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
September 15, 2015 14:00 - 55 minutes - 51 MBPresented by Prof. Sarah Russell on 11 September 2015. 2015 has been decreed the International Year of Light by the United Nations, and in recognition of this we expand our public astronomy lecture series from telescopes to microscopes. Our immune system protects us from infections and cancer when it works well, and caused autoimmune diseases when it goes wrong. Understanding how immunity is regulated has enabled the development of vaccines, immunosuppressive drugs, and cancer immunotherapie...
Galaxies and black holes (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
September 08, 2015 14:00 - 1 hour - 56.2 MBPresented by Prof. Roger Davies on 4 September 2015. Using exceptional data from Hubble Space Telescope astronomers have discovered supermassive black holes, with masses ranging from millions to billions times the mass of the Sun, at the very centre of massive galaxies. Intriguingly the mass of this central black hole scales with many of the properties of the host galaxy, for example the total mass of the galaxy is about five hundred times the mass of the black hole. However the direct gravi...
State of the Universe V - The Spectrum Strikes Back (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
August 18, 2015 04:30 - 51 minutes - 33.2 MBCelebrate the International Year of Light and National Science Week 2015 with Assoc. Prof. Chris Fluke, as he hosts his fifth annual review of the State of the Universe. This year, the focus is on the visual Universe. No supercomputers. No radiotelescopes. Just good old fashioned astronomy with images. Taken from spacecraft. Which needed radio telescopes to collect the images on Earth. And computers to process them. Presented by Chris Fluke on 14 August 2015.
Astronomy in the blink of an eye: transient events in the Universe (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
July 07, 2015 23:58 - 1 hour - 66 MBPresented by Emily Petroff on 19 June 2015. Most things in the Universe happen over millions or even billions of years but some things change on the timescales of human life and can be seen to change in a matter of months, days, or even seconds. These sources are called transients and are some of the most extreme events in the Universe, things like the collapse of a dying star, or a collision of two massive objects. Humans have been observing astronomical transients for centuries, from super...
Observatories of Chile (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
May 06, 2015 14:00 - 58 minutes - 53.4 MBPresented by Prof. Jeremy Mould on 7th May 2015. The skies of northern Chile are considered the best in the world for astronomy at visible through millimetre wavelengths. Most of the observatories are in the Norte Chico and Atacama regions. Cerro Paranal Observatory is the largest in the world. The Atacama Large Millimeter Array is an international astronomical facility composed of a group of up to 66 radio antennae working together 5000 meters above sea level in the hghlands (Llano de Chajn...
How the Universe grew up (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
April 12, 2015 14:00 - 1 hour - 56.5 MBPresented by Prof. Karl Glazebrook on 10th April 2015. The Universe began in the Big Bang now firmly established at 13.7 billion years ago. But then what? How did the hot expanding hydrogen of the early Universe turn in to the magnificent tapestry of the Universe we see around us? In this lecture I will tell the story of the galaxies, the building blocks of our Universe and how modern observations from large telescopes on the ground and in space have literally let us see how the galaxies hav...
Should we announce ourselves to the galaxy? The debate on Messaging to Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (METI) (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
March 12, 2015 13:00 - 53 minutes - 49.1 MBPresented by James Benford on 13th March 2015. Messaging to Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (METI) is an issue dividing those who want to announce our presence to the cosmos by broadcasting to the nearer stars and those who advocate international consultations on the societal risk of such transmissions. METI is the opposite of searching (SETI). METI transmissions to date are faint and very unlikely to be detected. If we do send messages, who should speak for us and what should they say? Shoul...
Planet formation through radio eyes (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
February 13, 2015 03:20 - 58 minutes - 53.5 MBPresented by David J. Wilner on 13 February 2015. Where did the Earth come from? How can we know? How can particles no larger than those in smoke come together to make a planet thousands of kilometers wide? Amazingly, radio telescope observations of material surrounding infant stars are starting to show us signs of planet formation in action. This talk will introduce some of the basic ideas and open questions of planet formation, starting with naked eye observations and proceeding to the lat...
A Tour of the Universe (and Selected Cosmic Mysteries) (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
December 06, 2014 13:00 - 59 minutes - 54.4 MBPresented by Dr Katherine Mack on 7th December 2014. Everything humanity has ever seen or experienced represents a tiny speck in a vast and mysterious Universe. What else is out there, and how are we figuring it out? What puzzles still wait to be solved? Come with your questions about dark matter, dark energy, black holes, or the ultimate fate of the Universe as we delve into some of cosmology's most fundamental questions.
The role of hydrogen in the evolution of galaxies (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
November 06, 2014 13:00 - 1 hour - 55.9 MBPresented by Assoc Prof. Virginia Kilborn on 7th November 2014. Hydrogen gas is one of the main components in a galaxy like our own Milky Way - but we can't see it when we gaze into the night sky. I will take you on a journey of the unseen parts of our Galaxy - and others like it - using sensitive observations taken with Australia's best radio telescopes. I will explain how astronomers use observations of hydrogen gas to determine the history, and predict the future, of galaxies in the univ...