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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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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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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My piece in ABC The Drum on what the 2016 budget means for science in Australia. Essentially things continue as we had hoped from earlier in the year with welcome long-term sustained funding. There was a welcome one-year extension to the Australian Astronomical Observatory delaying the end of that world-leading telescope facility by a year to 2019/20 which it is hoped will give time for a sustained and long term solution to astronomical funding in the nation.
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I was able to spend some time on the astoundingly ambitious Breakthrough Starshot mission to Alpha Centauri (which I've written about in Cosmos Magazine and theconversation). A private enterprise initiative that will see some incredible technologies pursued to try and reach a star within a human lifetime. Then onto a critical tech development as NASA technology to get CO2 from the Martian atmosphere finds its way into craft beer... Finally a little shout out for the ESO observation of the Fornax cluster.
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The incredible success of Elon Musk's SpaceX in landing on a barge at sea opens the way to potentially reusable rockets, slashing the costs of space travel. The same Falcon 9 had launched a potentially groundbreaking new space module, a blow-up (or inflatable) habitat by Bigelow Aerospace known as BEAM that has now docked with the International Space Station.
I was lucky enough to get to write for ABC The Drum about this, as well as speak to TripleJ Hack about what this might mean for the future of space exploration.
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A strange opportunity to speak, well, about myself. Usually I only chat to the media about the latest breaking science but this time the Sydney Morning Herald asked how I got into astrophysics and my thoughts on STEM education. Suffice to say I'm pretty keen on everyone getting to learn at least a little science!
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A fun chat on ABC Breakfast News TV about 500,000 never-before seen stars found by the Hubble Space Telescope in the centre of our galaxy, incredible observations of a 10 million year old star with planets forming (one at the same distance from it as the Earth is from the Sun!) and an inflatable space room for the International Space Station launching this weekend!
I gave a full write up of it in theconversation too..!
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I dragged the tone down slightly by discussing ESA's hunt for life on Mars with ExoMars trying to sniff out signs of life in the Martian atmosphere by searching for methane as, on Earth at least, this gas can be produced by life (typically in the ‘farts’ of sheep and cows as methanogens form it in their guts) however it’s also formed by geological processes so it’s not clear cut, yet..!
I also chatted about amazing new Hubble images of 9 monstrously large stars and gave a plug for the planetarium show Capturing the Cosmos to be released tonight.
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What an incredible year it’s been for Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko orbiting 5440 times around the Earth and 340 days later they have traveled a distance equal to that too Mars. This is the test needed to know what humanity will experience getting to the red planet and the science from this has only started. As a control sample there’s Scott's twin brother Mark Kelly, who offers the best (though even as an identical twin not perfect) comparison to try to observe changes in Scott’s genetic profile due to space.
Also a big shout out to NASA's awesome Hubble Space Telescope finding the most distant galaxy. Madness that it’s forming so vigorously when the universe was just a few hundred million years old.
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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 discovery of gravitational waves is legitimately one that will be remembered for generations. We are now able to see into the universe with an entirely new sense beyond our conventional telescopes, as far removed from sight as sound. A huge day and I ended up chatting to The Project, Channel 7’s Weekend Sunrise as well as mamamia, VICE, Cosmos and theconversation but seriously I could keep on for weeks, this is the biggest discovery that I’ve witnessed in my scientific career.
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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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Caltech researchers led by Prof Mike Brown who formerly demoted Pluto have published tentative results of a ninth planet in our Solar System, and at ten times the mass of Earth it’s in no danger of not qualifying for planet status if real. Fainter than a lightbulb on the Moon and moving each second on the sky about a human hair’s width held at 100km it will be challenging to find against the 100 million stars of the Milk Way behind it’s approximate area.
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