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I was part of an amazing initiative by Jacinta Lee Den Besten to get astronomy as part of schools curriculum across the State. Known as Telescopes in Schools a dozen quality telescopes have been housed in schools that then run regular evening night sky tours. I swung round a few schools to chat about what you can see (and what you can't like Dark Matter).
Read MoreMy continuing interviews with Peter Spinks now on rogue exoplanets, which came up in our succesful Are We Alone night in Federation Square, Melbourne. This was originally printed in The Age (but thanks to syndication appeared in the Brisbane Times and the Sydney Morning Herald!)
Read MoreMy first interview with Peter Spinks on the search for exoplanets, features a plug for the Are We Alone night in Federation Square, Melbourne. This was originally printed in The Age (thanks to syndication also appeared in Brisbane Times and the Sydney Morning Herald).
Read MoreIn this paper, we present a fascinating technique using the outbursts of supermassive blackholes as barometers to measure the pressure of the gas around the galaxies, as the outbursts inflate 'bubbles' of ionised gas. These pressures were then compared with the hydrodynamical simulations and found to be significantly rarer, over-pressurised regions than normal. Reference: Malarecki, Staveley-Smith, Saripalli, Subrahmanyan, Jones, Duffy, Rioja 2013 MNRAS 432 200M.
Read MoreCan science be taught through comedy? I headed to the Adelaide Fringe to test the theory out. I will never do stand up again but yes particle physics lessons were remembered by the audience later that evening which was cool
Read MoreIn this paper, Sarah and I started investigating the shape and spin properties of Dark Matter haloes just after I left Jodrell Bank. This then increased in scope when she started to consider the actions of the baryons (as featured in Duffy et al 2010) in changing these key properties of the collapsed Dark Matter structures. This work showed that the baryons strongly influence the halo, making it more spherical and rotating faster than the Dark Matter only predictions. This is a key result for Gravitational lensing and X-ray temperature mass estimates. Reference: Bryan, Kay, Duffy, Schaye, Dalla Vecchia, Booth 2013 MNRAS 429 3316B.
Read MoreI made it all the way to UK when the Daily Mail picked up my research for the new surveys using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder... known as WALLABY and DINGO. Great pun leading this... "Forget Skippy: WALLABY and DINGO to find 700k galaxies". Also the comments at the end are fun too.
Read MoreA feature by the always superb Guardian newspaper on my work predicting the performance of the upcoming Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder telescope.
Read MoreAn extended interview in The Age on the possibilities of finding galaxies with the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder telescope.
Read MoreWhat started off as a chat about my latest research on finding galaxies with a soon to be built telescope ended up in a massive discussion about the Big Bang!
Read MoreA planetarium show using the latest simulations of dark matter created at the same time as the science. Together with legend director Peter Morse and data visualisation guru Professor Paul Bourke, Dark has been (as of August 2015) shown by 148 planetariums in 25 countries around the world and dubbed into 6 languages.
Read MoreI gave a few words on the opening night of my planetarium show Dark at the SciTech planetarium in Perth, WA. In particular I pointed out that the simulations shown on the big screen were used in my research papers at the same time that this outreach effort was undertaken.
Read MoreIn this paper, we used one of the largest simulated universes in existence (the Millennium Simulation) we populated the Dark Matter haloes with detailed Neutral Hydrogen gas (which radio telescopes can detect). By 'observing' these objects with the expected performance of the Australian SKA Pathfinder telescope we created a series virtual surveys that ASKAP can be expected to detect. These catalogues are as detailed and real as we can hope to have until we turn the telescope on. Some incredible fly through movies and images are available (be warned they can be pretty large). Reference: Duffy, Meyer, Staveley-Smith et al 2012 MNRAS 426 3385D
Read MoreThis paper is our analysis of the ability of the forthcoming Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder to investigate the nature of Dark Energy. It will likely be the first radio telescope to make these kind of observations and is an exciting precursor to the type of science that the full Square Kilometre Array (SKA) can accomplish. Reference: Duffy, Moss, Staveley-Smith 2012 PASA 29 202D
Read MoreMy first TEDx talk at Northbridge to talk about the amazing discoveries in astronomy and the technological innovation that made them possible (as well as the lucrative spin off tech that came from these).
Read MoreThis 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.
Read MoreThis 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?
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreA 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?
Read MoreIn 2011/2012 I was chosen by the Sunday Times Magazine as one of Western Australia's Best and Brightest. Incredibly I'm in the same list as rugby international legend David Pocock, which is absurd but definitely flattering!
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