An unusual opportunity came up to speak at the International Mining and Resources Conference housed at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre to explore the possibilities of spin off tech from our underground dark matter searches. I focussed on the science of SABRE, the possibilities of an X-ray like scan for gold in the mine around using Muon Tomography and other underground science such as understanding how life grows without radiation / astrobiology. Finally I discussed the possible future for mining, in space! Key technologies such as automation and refinement have been deployed by the giants in the resource extraction sector and could find a home for their advanced technologies in the final frontier.
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A key goal of the DRAGONS investigation was to predict how growing galaxies in the early universe would ionise the neutral hydrogen around them. This is the long-sought after signal of Reionisation (also known as Cosmic Dawn) when the Universe was filled with light, lifting this dark opaque fog. It is the target for telescopes like the Square Kilometre Array to characterise that early universe when ionised bubbles of gas around the galaxies resembles a swiss cheese model. This beautiful work by Dr Paul Geil calculated how our simulated galaxies would impact that material around them finding that the galaxy formation that resulted in the biggest impact was the nature of how stars exploded. This both ionised gas around it but more importantly limited how new stars could form and hence limit the amount of ionising radiation and therefore the size and number of the ionised bubbles. This is however not a unique signature and instead even when we find the swiss cheese universe we have a lot of work ahead to tease out its lessons. Depressing but beautifully analysed science by Paul.
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Amidst the exciting news of landing on comets and SpaceX plans to get to Mars, NASA released astounding findings that the smallest planet Mercury actually has tectonic activity just like Earth. Such a small world should be geologically dead and yet it has features that appear unweathered by bombardments from meteors meaning that they are no older than a few million years. It means Mercury joins Earth as the only rocky planet to have tectonic activity, and also means it may have Earthquakes (or should that be Mercury-quakes?)
I wrote about it in theconversation and chatted to ABC Breakfast News TV as well as ABC 702 radio.
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A mammoth effort by my long-time collaborator Dr Simon Mutch explaining the semi-analytic model Meraxes that `paints' the galaxies onto the background dark matter structures formed in the huge simulated DRAGONS universe. This work has so many critical lessons on key physics that grows a galaxy that matches what we see in the distant universe (and hence seeing those objects as they were long ago when the light first left them). Perhaps the key is that the fraction of energetic light that can escape forming galaxies (and hence ionise the neutral hydrogen atoms in the vast distances between them) has to increase towards earlier times. Somehow galaxies trap evermore of this radiation as they grow up. A mystery that we will hopefully solve in this series of works!
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The first paper by Chuanwu Liu in his PhD with DRAGONS showed that we can explain observations of distant galaxies glowing in ultraviolet (UV) light. This light is responsible for ionising the neutral hydrogen between the galaxies, ending the Cosmic Dark Ages in a process known as Reionisation. Chuanwu's work showed that our simulated galaxies can recreate the current observations, but that we can then predict what future observations may see as our simulations form much smaller objects at this time than even Hubble can find. The main finding was that dwarf galaxies are responsible for providing most of the ionising radiation that lights up the universe; in agreement with my entirely complimentary and independent technique in Duffy et al. (2014b). Promising start to your academic career Chuanwu with such a careful and expansive analysis on this hot topic!
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I got to indulge my twin passions, science and science fiction, in this talk for Swinburne's Open Day. One day I hope to record a more polished, full length talk, for now this is a great 'best-of' compilation by the team.
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An amazing opportunity to be the official Ambassador for the Sydney Science Festival a role which meant I got to give the opening lecture on the incredible Large Hadron Collider at CERN which you can watch here. There was a great write up of the event in the Sydney Morning Herald (where the image came from) and which featured in several TV and radio interviews.
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I was interviewed as part of the Born Digital Week by National and State Libraries Australasia to raise awareness of how much data we create, what it's value is and how best to preserve it. Far from being preserved forever online, the digital world is potentially entering a Digital Dark Age as a book two thousand years old is still readable while I haven't got a clue what to do with a floppy disk from just two decades ago.
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An amazing opportunity to see Prof Brian Cox speak in a sell-out MCEC plenary event during his Journey into Deep Space tour of Australia. He basically explained the beginning and ultimate end of the universe (Eternal Inflationary Cosmology explains both if you were curious) from first principles which is no mean feat.
Event better was getting backstage to hang out with him and Robin Ince (thoroughly lovely human being) and chat science. Definitely one of the coolest things I've done recently and it's given me some great ideas (i.e. that I'll steal) to use in my own talks!
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Fun chat in my regular space segment on ABC Breakfast News about the astoundingly ambitious Juno mission to Jupiter, seriously it's still wondrously madly insane to try this orbit but NASA managed. Here's my thoughts in ABC The Drum. I then got to show off a beautiful new image by the Hubble Space Telescope of the Crab Nebula and finally a triple star system found by ESO that has a planet around it (and which doesn't experience night for hundreds of years at a time).
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The first paper in the DRAGONS series, by my long time collaborator Dr Greg Poole, explaining the enormous dark matter simulation Tiamat that underlines the entire project. This is an epic work detailing the challenges involved in correctly identifying dark matter structures within which galaxies are expected to form. This is particularly challenging at early times in the universe's history when so many dark matter haloes were colliding and merging, causing a nightmare for basic book-keeping or cataloguing of such messy objects. Beautiful work and one that sets the stage for the rest of the DRAGONS papers!
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I truly adore chatting with Richard, he has an insatiable curiosity and that fact he loves science (astronomy in particular!) means our hour long chat flies by... This time we focussed on the hunt for dark matter with SABRE, the world's first dark matter detector in the Southern Hemisphere, and the science of scifi which films do it well and which don't, I'm looking at you Armageddon.
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An amazing opportunity to sit at the desk on The Project and discuss the science behind solar studies of the Sun's activities, that we going into a regular Solar Minimum, although it may be heralding the beginning of a Maunder Minimum which saw Europe plunged into a 'Mini-Ice Age'. Read here and here about why that's not the case (for starters the Mini Ice-Age began before the 70 year lack of sunspots in the Maunder Minimum!) but even if it were to occur now we've warmed things on Earth so much it would only slow the heating down not reverse it.
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Fun chat on the ABC Breakfast TV couch describing the latest in 3D printing tech - on board the International Space Station! It allows astronauts to print off any spares as needed, including a new tool designed by a high school student! I also chatted about Saturn's flawless rings seen by NASA's Cassini spacecraft to have a blemish by a nearby moon's gravity and CSIRO's upgrading of the largest telescope on Earth, China's FAST.
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The first paper by Paul Angel for his PhD as part of DRAGONS and it's enormous. A careful phenomenological study and characterisation of the structure of dark matter haloes in the early universe. In particular Paul focussed on the concentration of the dark matter haloes as measured by fitting the halo with the NFW and Einasto profiles. At the current age of the universe works such as Duffy et al. (2008) show small mass haloes are typical denser (that is more concentrated) that more massive ones. This is because smaller objects form earlier than large objects in our hierarchical universe, earlier times in an expanding universe implies that it was overall smaller and hence denser as are then the objects that form. Paul discovered that the universe in DRAGONS is so young that essentially everything is forming at nearly the same time and hence density so the concentration-mass relation is flat!
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An amazing discovery by the ALMA telescope of giant clouds of cold gas falling towards a supermassive black hole, seen as shadows against the bright glow from this feeding black hole. In addition I discussed the worsening global light pollution phenomenon and a surprise chain galaxy found by citizen scientists from Russia using the Australian Radio Galaxy Zoo!
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What an experience getting to chat to the legendary Margaret Throsby on ABC Classic FM for an hour on astrophysics, dark matter, aboriginal astronomy and of course my five songs with a surprising twist to the idea of 'classical' music. Have a listen.
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Read my thoughts on an incredible week for commercial exploration of space at theconversation or watch on ABC Breakfast News. It started with Bigelow Aerospace successfully inflating their BEAM attachment to the ISS. If the two year long test of this inflatable space module works then they plan to launch larger inflatables to form a commercial space laboratory as well as potentially even a space hotel! This week also saw the landing at sea of a rocket for the third time in a row by SpaceX. Now they need to demonstrate an economic refurbishment and relaunch of any of these three rockets to usher in a new era of space travel.
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This is quite frankly an astounding feat of engineering but NASA's MMS mission has flown through a magnetic reconnection event - this is where titanic eruptions from the Sun slam into Earth's protective magnetic field and it snaps, releasing energy which we see as an aurora (at best, at worst it destroys our electricity grids!)
One of the most challenging computational puzzles and these observations will be key to understanding this physics. It's also the same physics that limits us in perfecting nuclear fusion power on Earth so something we can all hope is solved and soon!
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Some huge stories this week (which I covered in theconversation as well as ABC Breakfast News) on ESA's Swarm satellites measuring the pulsing of the Earth's magnetic field, it's so called magnetic heartbeat. This then lead on to the topic of the magnetic poles swapping places (always a startling fact!) and then the measurements from Australian rocks that a younger Earth had a thinner atmosphere than today when we always had assumed it must have been thicker... These stories were so huge that the fact we found 1284 planets around other stars by NASA's Kepler satellite was left to the end!
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