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
The search for gravitational waves - Ripples from the dark side of the Universe (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
October 22, 2014 00:00 - 1 hour - 59.3 MBPresented by Prof. Sheila Rowan on 17th October 2014. The information carried by these signals will give us new insight into the hearts of some of the most violent events in the Cosmos - from black holes to the beginning of the Universe. A global network of gravitational wave detectors is in now reaching the final stages of construction, with first data expected in 2015. The nature of gravitational waves, how the detectors work and what the data from the detectors can tell us about the Unive...
Women in Astronomy (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
October 06, 2014 13:00 - 1 hour - 65.7 MBPresented by Dr Pamela Gay on 7th October 2014. Scientific literacy is required if we want our global society to succeed, but for a variety of reasons, science isn't a passion for most people, and most of the people in science are stereotypical white men. This is particularly true in the field of astronomy. In order to build a future that is more inclusive, we need to celebrate the successes of diverse researchers, and we need to use many different pathways to bring people to astronomy. In ...
Into the heart of darkness: Supermassive black holes at the centres of galaxies - 2014 (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
September 17, 2014 14:00 - 1 hour - 62.9 MBPresented by Associate Professor Darren Croton on 19th September 2014. Black holes are amongst 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 Associate Professor Darren Croton discusses the physics of black holes and their formation, how they can grow to become so massive, active black hole 'quasa...
A Night at the Keck (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
July 17, 2014 14:00 - 1 hour - 72.8 MBPresented by Dr Jeff Cooke, Mark Durre and Associate Professor Michael Murphy on 18th July 2014. Swinburne University of Technology astronomers will share their stories of discovery using twin 10-metre telescopes at the W M Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii at a free public lecture on 18 July. Each year since 2008, Swinburne astronomers have had 15 nights' exclusive access to the world's leading optical/infrared telescopes. Using the observatory's cutting-edge instrumentation, astronom...
Shadows of the Big Bang: The search for pristine gas fueling galaxies (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
June 04, 2014 14:00 - 1 hour - 61.2 MBPresented Assoc. Prof. John O'Meara on 6th July 2014. Through the combination of large telescopes, advanced computer simulations and advancing theory, cosmologists have made significant progress in describing the universe on the largest scales and over cosmic times. However, many questions remain. Amongst these is a fundamental question underpinning the formation of galaxies - how do galaxies get the gas they need to fuel stars? In this talk, Assoc. Prof O'Meara will describe the hunt for th...
Light pollution or who stole the night? (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
May 14, 2014 14:00 - 1 hour - 58.2 MBPresented by Dr Nick Lomb on 16th May 2014. Melbourne is brightly lit at night. Some lighting is needed for safety, security and to make the city centre an attractive place, but is it all necessary? Why are we lighting the sky when no one lives there? In this talk we will discuss good and bad lighting and consider the effects of night-time lighting on safety, on the environment, on nocturnal animals and, most importantly, on our health. We will end by discussing what we can do individually a...
Witnessing the deaths of the first stars in the Universe - from Hawthorn (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
April 10, 2014 14:00 - 58 minutes - 53.5 MBPresented by Dr Jeff Cooke on 11th April 2014. In this talk, I will take you back to a time shortly after the Big Bang when the first stars emerged from the darkness. Many of these stars were much more massive than our Sun and ended their short lives as extraordinarily brilliant supernova explosions. Using new techniques and the power of the Keck telescopes in Hawaii, now controllable from Swinburne, we are able to detect supernova explosions that occurred more than 12 billion years ago and ...
Galaxies from the dawn of time (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
March 20, 2014 13:00 - 1 hour - 66.6 MBPresented by Dr Ivo Labbe on 21st March 2014. The arrival of modern space telescopes, such as the Hubble Space Telescope have ushered in a true golden age in astronomy. We can now peer farther and deeper into the universe than ever before and are getting an astonishing glimpse of the distant past. The most sensitive astronomical picture ever taken, the so-called Hubble Ultra Deep Field, reveals a time long gone when galaxies like our Milky way were only just forming, bursting with explosive ...
Hunting for Astronomical Fossils with Keck (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
February 10, 2014 13:00 - 46 minutes - 42.5 MBPresented by Professor Duncan Forbes on 11th February 2014. Ancient star clusters are the fossils of the astronomical world. They formed at early times in the Universe and many have survived to the present day. New discoveries made with the Keck Observatory have uncovered a host of previously unknown star clusters - some more massive than small galaxies. Join us for an engaging presentation by Professor Duncan Forbes from Swinburne University, Australia, as he shares his current research and...
Einstein and Astronomers: An Ongoing Cosmic Saga (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
November 07, 2013 13:00 - 1 hour - 57.6 MBPresented by Dr Eyal Kazin on 8th November 2013. Astronomers and Physicists have an interesting ongoing relationship. Normally, physicists explain natural phenomena, and tell astronomers what they should be probing in space. Once in a while, however, astronomers point out observations that cause the theorists to poke in the dark for interpretations. Dr. Kazin will bring the audience up to speed on the frontiers of these golden ages of cosmology and explain why scientists are still baffled ab...
Observing echoes of the Big Bang in the Universe's most distant light (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
October 10, 2013 13:00 - 1 hour - 55.3 MBPresented by Associate Professor Chris Blake on 11th October 2013. As we peer out into space, what is the most distant light we can see? The answer is the cosmic microwave background radiation, the faint afterglow of the hot Big Bang across the sky, which has travelled for almost 14 billion years to reach us. Within the microwave background, at the edge of the observable Universe, we can see the tiny ripples out of which galaxies such as our own later formed. In this talk, Assoc. Prof. Chris...
CosmoQuest: Science inside (powered by you!) (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
September 12, 2013 14:00 - 1 hour - 62 MBPresented by Dr Pamela Gay on 13th September 2013. In order to handle the onslaught of data coming from space and ground-based telescopes, many astronomers are turning to the public for aid. The team behind the new CosmoQuest virtual research centre is building a first of its kind research community for professional and citizen scientists to work together on advancing our understanding of the universe; a community of people who are participating in doing science, and in learning about this c...
Understanding the Universe (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
July 08, 2013 14:00 - 55 minutes - 50.8 MBPresented by Syed Uddin on 9th July 2013. Just over a century ago the fixed stars we see in the night sky were the limit of the entire Universe. The Universe was assumed to be static. Now we have discovered that our Universe is not only expanding but is also accelerating. Galaxies play an important role here. In this talk I will describe how our knowledge about the Universe as a whole is evolving over time with emerging techniques and technologies.
Understanding our weird Universe: common sense won't save you (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
June 16, 2013 14:00 - 1 hour - 66.8 MBPresented by Dr Jonathan Whitmore on 17th May 2013 Two foundational physical theories of science: Quantum Physics and General Relativity are counterintuitive descriptions of reality. They also form the foundation upon which much of our modern technology depends: from MRI machines, to lasers, to GPS. The methods of science are not the methods of common sense -- in fact, relying on common sense will almost assuredly lead down a false path. This talk will include a brief history of the scientif...
The "Gran Telescopio de Canarias" (GTC): First Light of the Largest Optical Telescope on Earth (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
May 02, 2013 14:00 - 59 minutes - 54.1 MBPresented by Professor Rafael Guzman on 3rd May 2013. The GTC is the last -and the largest- of the new generation of large ground-based observatories that have opened up a new era of discoveries in astronomy at the dawn of the XXIst Century. The GTC has been built by a consortium of institutions from Spain, Mexico and the University of Florida. In this talk, I will review the general characteristics of this state-of-the-art telescope. I will also describe the main contributions of the Univer...
Chasing dead stars (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
April 18, 2013 14:00 - 1 hour - 62.1 MBPresented by Anna Sippel on 19th April 2013. Stars don't shine forever - and especially very massive stars don't live very long before ending their lives as neutron stars or black holes. In this lecture we will focus on the endpoints of the evolution of such massive stars and how a black hole can be formed during a stellar explosion called supernova. We will discuss how black holes of different sizes can be detected under certain circumstances, and implications for theories that stellar-mass...
The lives of stars: from birth to death (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
March 21, 2013 13:00 - 56 minutes - 52.2 MBPresented by Assoc. Prof. Sarah Maddison on 22nd March 2013. When we look up into the night sky, almost all the light we see comes from stars: single stars, stellar clusters, and even giant ensembles of stars that make up galaxies. How and where do stars form? How and why do they evolve? And what is the fate of stars? In this talk we will go on a journey through the life of star, from their birth to death, and learn about the important role that stellar evolution plays in both galaxies and l...
Old galaxies in the aging universe (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
February 12, 2013 13:00 - 1 hour - 67.9 MBPresented by Pierluigi Cerulo and Nicola Pastorello on 15th February 2013. As part of a 14 billion years old expanding universe, we are able to directly experience only a tiny part of its history. In order to reconstruct the evolutionary history of the universe, it is fundamental to study the properties of objects which are billions of light years away from us. In fact, the light coming from these galaxies travels at a finite speed, giving us a picture of how they were when the universe was ...
A Night in the Life of an Astronomer (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
December 06, 2012 13:00 - 59 minutes - 54.4 MBPresented by Dr Lee Spitler on 7th December 2012. Through a visual journey, you will travel with an astronomer, Dr. Lee Spitler, on an observing trip to the remote 6.5-metre Baade Magellan Telescope. In the still Chilean night, you will collect astronomy data to hunt for galaxies billions of light years away from Earth. Learn about the trials and tribulations of a professional astronomer.
Mapping the Universe (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
November 22, 2012 13:00 - 48 minutes - 44.6 MBPresented by Dr. Rita Tojeiro on 23rd Nivember 2012. Over the last few decades astronomers have made enormous leaps in charting the Universe around us. Now, with accurate positions for millions of galaxies, we are finally able to trace the Cosmic Web in which we live. But these cosmic maps do far more than simply catalogue the contents of our Universe - they can help us to understand its origin and evolution as well as its ultimate fate. Cosmologist Dr Rita Tojeiro takes us on a voyage to th...
Cosmic Fireworks (also known as When Galaxies Collide) (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
October 25, 2012 13:00 - 51 minutes - 47.4 MBPresented by Prof. Richard de Grijs on 26th October 2012. Studying galactic interactions is like sifting through the forensic evidence at a crime scene. Astronomers wade through the debris of a violent encounter, collecting clues so that they can reconstruct the celestial crime to determine when it happened. Take the case of Messier 82, a small, nearby galaxy that long ago bumped into its larger neighbour, Messier 81. When did this violent encounter occur? New infrared and visible-light pict...
Into the heart of darkness: supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies - 2012 (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
October 04, 2012 14:00 - 1 hour - 76 MBPresented by Associate Professor Darren Croton on 5th October 2012. Black holes are amongst 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 Associate Professor Darren Croton discusses the physics of black holes and their formation, how they can grow to become so massive, active black hole "quasars"...
100 years of galaxy redshifts (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
September 09, 2012 14:00 - 1 hour - 66.3 MBPresented by Prof. Karl Glazebrook on 9th September 2012. On Sep 17th 1912 Vesto M. Slipher at Lowell Observatory measured the first redshift of a galaxy and established their large velocities, this laid the groundwork for Hubble's discovery of the expansion of the Universe. One hundred years later we have measured close to 2 million galaxy redshifts (about one third of these measured in Australia) and this has been fundamental to our understanding of the structure of the Universe. In this p...
Astronomy from the Antarctic Plateau (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
July 19, 2012 14:00 - 56 minutes - 52.1 MBPresented by Professor Jeremy Mould on 20th July 2012. Dome A on the Antarctic Plateau may be the best site for astronomical telescopes on Earth, In the Mawson centennial year we should note that Australians have been pioneers in collecting these site test data. We now have an opportunity to join a Chinese project to build a 2.5 metre telescope at Dome A. This would be the most powerful infrared survey telescope anywhere. A two-micron survey of the southern hemisphere would find targets for ...
The Secret Life of an Elliptical Galaxy (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
June 11, 2012 14:00 - 1 hour - 55.6 MBPresented by Christina Blom-Smith on 12 June 2012. Despite their uniform appearance elliptical galaxies often have complex and disturbed formation histories. Without the presence of gas, dust and star formation, that we see readily in spiral galaxies, it can be extremely tricky to probe their intriguing formation histories. It is vital to understand how they form since elliptical galaxies contain the highest proportion of stars in the universe and the largest ones uniformly dominate galaxy c...
From grains to planets (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
May 24, 2012 14:00 - 44 minutes - 40.9 MBPresented by Catarina Ubach and Francesco Pignatale on 25th May 2012. Solar System bodies such as planets, meteorites and comets are all created from small grains during the protoplanetary disk phase. The chemical composition of all these objects is intrinsically related to the chemistry of gas and grains in the parent disk. In the first part of the lecture we will explore the evidence we have to understand grain growth in discs. In the second part of the lecture we will go through the chemi...
Learning about the sub-atomic world from observations to the edge of the Universe (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
April 17, 2012 14:00 - 1 hour - 55.2 MBPresented by Assoc. Prof. Chris Blake on 18th April 2012. Scientists have been trying to understand the building blocks of matter for millenia. What are the fundamental particles and forces that shape the sub-atomic world? Even today, we are faced with a series of puzzles and challenges that could overturn our view of reality. What particle makes up the dark matter? What are neutrinos, and do they really trave l faster than the speed of light? What caused the slight imbalance between matter ...
The Dynamic Universe (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
March 27, 2012 13:00 - 1 hour - 62.2 MBPresented by Professor Shri Kulkarni on 28th March 2012. That occasionally new sources ("Stella Nova") would pop up in the heavens was noted more than a thousand years ago. The earnest study of cosmic explosions began in earnest less than a hundred years ago. Stella Novae are now divided into two major families, novae and supernovae (with real distinct classes in each). Equally the variable stars have a rich phenomenology. Together, supernovae and variable stars have contributed richly to ke...
The Next 50 Years of Space Exploration: Hunting for Life in the Solar System (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
February 13, 2012 13:00 - 1 hour - 65.4 MBPresented by Dr Michael Shara on 14th Feburary 2012. This is based on a current exhibition a the American Museum of Natural History that Dr Michael Shara has curated. Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration offers a vision of space travel as it boldly explores our next steps in our solar system and beyond.
Dynamics in the solar system (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
December 31, 2011 13:00 - 1 hour - 28.7 MBPresented by Assoc. Prof. Sarah Maddison on 20th October 2011. The clockwork-like motion of the planets around the Sun is well understood thanks to Newton's universal law of gravitation. Using Newtonian physics and some simple mathematical equations, we can describe (and predict) the motion of a planet around the Sun. The solution to this "2-body problem" allows us to determine the location of an orbiting body at any time in the future. But when we add just one more body, the situation becom...
The ATLAS Experiment at CERN's Large Hadron Collider - status and outlook (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
December 01, 2011 13:00 - 1 hour - 66.9 MBPresented by Prof. Geoff Taylor on 2nd December 2011 The Large Hadron Collider is operating beautifully well. Data from the highest energy particle collisions produced in the laboratory is being amassed at rates never before achieved. The big experiments, including the ATLAS experiment, on which Australian scientists collaborate, are operating extraordinarily well considering their complexity. The level of sophistication of analyses achieved with such a short period of operation has surprise...
Into the heart of darkness: Supermassive black holes at the centres of galaxies - 2011 (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
June 14, 2011 14:00 - 57 minutes - 52.9 MBPresented by Dr Darren Croton on 15th June 2011. Black holes are amongst 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 Associate Professor Darren Croton discusses the physics of black holes and their formation, how they can grow to become so massive, active black hole "quasars" in the distant un...
The Multiwavelength Atlas of Galaxies - dealings with publishers, editors, typesetters and creating an academic textbook (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
April 14, 2011 14:00 - 1 hour - 72.7 MBPresented by Dr Glen Mackie on 15th April 2011. Galaxies have been observed from ultra high energy gamma rays to long wavelength radio waves, providing fundamental insights into their formation and evolution. Until now, astronomy atlases preferentially showed (only) optical images of galaxies. Unveiling the secrets of some of the best observed galaxies, the published MAG contains over 250 full colour images of 35 galaxies spanning the whole electromagnetic spectrum. MAG explains why we see t...
Are we alone?: 50 years of SETI! (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
March 22, 2011 10:00 - 57 minutes - 66.8 MBPresented by A/Prof Charles Lineweaver (ANU) on 19th November 2010. The scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has been going on for 50 years. So far, no signals from intelligent aliens have been detected. Presented by Associate Professor Charles Lineweaver (ANU) on 19 November 2010.
A Scientific Revolution: the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
February 22, 2011 13:00 - 53 minutes - 48.7 MBPresented by Dr Jonathan Gardner on 23rd February 2011. Astronomy is going through a scientific revolution, responding to a flood of data from the Hubble Space Telescope, other space mission and large telescopes on the ground. In this talk, I will discuss some of the most important astronomical discoveries of the last 10 years and the role that space telescopes have played in those discoveries.
Gravitational Lensing: Einstein's Unfinished Symphony (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
September 16, 2010 14:00 - 58 minutes - 53.3 MBPresented by Professor Richard Ellis on 7th September 2010. In 1919, Arthur Eddington demonstrated Einsteins's prediction that the Sun's gravity deflects the path of light rays. This phenomonon, termed 'gravitational lensing' is now one of the most powerful tools of the modern astronomer. Professor Ellis reviews the history and progress in charting how dark matter is distributed and how easily galaxies can be located using gravitational lensing.
From Games to Galaxies (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
August 19, 2010 14:00 - 1 hour - 58.3 MBPresented by Dr Christopher Fluke on 20th August 2010. Advancements in modern astronomy are increasingly dependent on access to powerful computing facilities. This talk introduces the exciting new world of CPU-powered astronomy, which is taking us from computer games to galaxies.
The Cosmic Dark Ages (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
April 16, 2010 10:00 - 45 minutes - 41.4 MBPresented by Dr Emma Ryan-Weber on 16th April 2010. How did the elements come into existence, and how we can use them to count the number of stars in the early Universe? This talk will reveal the dark ages of the Universe.
The Extreme Side of Pulsars (Free Astronomy Public Lectures)
March 03, 2010 10:00 - 37 minutes - 34.7 MBPresented by Sarah Burke-Spolaor and Lina Levin on 19th February 2010. Pulsars are the compact cores of dead stars that periodically flash radio beams at Earth. The regularity of their flashing makes them somewhat like highly accurate clocks--however not all pulsars are very well behaved. This lecture will give a background to pulsar astronomy and detail the extreme behaviours that some of these enigmatic stars exhibit. New, bizarre classes of pulsars are regularly being discovered, and we w...