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 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 way to start a week chatting to ABC Breakfast News about NASA's WFIRST mission, a former spy satellite now repurposed as a new wide-eye Hubble space telescope! I also explained how we measured the atmosphere of a (roasting hot) super Earth for the first time (it's cyanide, don't move there) and how the Sun destroyed potentially dangerous asteroids by baking them into oblivion..!
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The reanalysis of Apollo era moon rocks show they are identical to those of Earth supporting the theory that an early Earth was slammed in a head-on collision by a Mars-sized world we call Theia. The fragments from this would one day become the Moon!
I also mentioned a newly discovered super-cold ‘space pancake’ and the boomerang gas cloud.
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My thoughts on the newly announced Innovation Statement from new PM Turnbull’s government. There’s a lot to like in this package of over 20 policies/initiatives and I wrote a piece for ABC The Drum focussing on those that will impact research most directly.
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Deeply honoured to be featured alongside everyday Australian legends as Commbank’s Australian of the Day campaign. Fun chatting to them about my work on Dark Matter as well as helping inspire and educate Australians about the awesomeness of science.
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I had a horribly awkward fanboy moment when I got to meet the legend himself Buzz Aldrin! There are few people in this world I consider a living legend but Buzz is one, so getting to shake his hand and then hear about his experiences on the Moon and his hoped for plans about getting to Mars was incredible.
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I’m CI of the dark matter detector SABRE at the Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory and can proudly announce that we've been funded by the ARC! Australia will now join an international search for the nature of dark matter as the first site in the Southern Hemisphere.
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One of the best science lectures I've ever seen was at Monash University by Caltech's legend GR expert Prof Kip Thorne giving the Einstein Centenary lecture to celebrate a century since General Relativity was released to the world. Fittingly, he used the examples of Interstellar's Black Holes, time dilation and 5-dimensional (bulk) beings to make the topic all the more accessible to the (sold out) auditorium.
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A website tracks PhD supervisors to find your 'academic genealogy' and none-other than Stephen Hawking is my Great-Grandad! Meaningless but hilarious.
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Just an amazing experience heading up to the beautiful Pilbara region of West Australia to speak about aboriginal astronomy. I was part of an amazing lineup of speakers and events for the Karijini Experience, featuring everything from indigenous basket weaving techniques to Opera in the Gorge by the incomparable Deborah Cheetham
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This new high resolution study of neutral hydrogen (HI) in local galaxies, led by Baerbel Koribalska has a great name LVHIS (almost pronounced Elvis... which is reason enough to look at this work). It's also a fantastically thorough and exhaustive study into the kinematic properties of 12 nearby dwarf galaxies. The study of galaxy rotations using the HI line isn't anything new of course, but the dataset presented here represents the quality of data that we can routinely expect from the forthcoming Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) and hence is a valuable guide into the uses (and pitfalls) of high resolution kinematic data.
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This is a summary of 3 papers released today by the above authors (who all shuffle in order dependent on the exact paper) but basically it's a way to improve the measurements of the Baryonic Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 sample of galaxies... So of course the first question is, what's the BAO?
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The latest 'citizen science' project to hit the astronomical shelves is a really fun investigation into the HII (ionised hydrogen) bubbles that form around young, ionising stars or Supernovae explosions. The issue here is that they can be very complex shapes as the shock wave around such ionising sources will typically flow around dense interstellar gas. This means that identifying such objects will be difficult for automated systems but easy for humans with our pretty impressive pattern recognition skills. This is the idea of the project - harness the power of people for a problem that we can uniquely solve.
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A series of N-body simulations (so gravity only, no worrying about computationally expensive, or indeed theoretically poorly understood gas and stellar physics) of objects that are of similar total mass to the Milky Way halo. So far so Aquarius (which indeed this paper uses) but the nice take on the problem is that the Dark Matter is assumed to self-interact. There's no theoretical reason why it shouldn't (and indeed they reference a Yukawa-like gauge boson interaction that might have just such a velocity-dependent interaction cross-section) but that's beyond my area of expertise, besides it's not a new idea so feel free to wiki it probably. Instead all we need to know is that this could happen and if so, what are the consequences of Dark Matter that can?
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