Antimatter has been disappearing and Melbourne researcher Phillip Urquijo wants to know why.
Phillip Urquijo—looking for missing antimatter. Credit: Casamento photography
He’s hoping that the Belle II experiment, commencing in Japan in 2017, will give him an answer—and if he’s lucky it will answer many other questions about the beginning of the Universe too.
“What I hope we’ll discover is clear evidence of new quarks, leptons or other force-carrying particles,” says Phillip. “And I’d be really excited if we found a new kind of Higgs particle using this indirect approach.”
An Australian physicist is unravelling the mystery of how the hot, brilliant stars we see today emerged from our Universe’s “dark age”.
Stuart Wyithe’s models of an early universe will be explored by the next generation of telescope. Credit: Prime Minister’s Science Prizes/Bearcage
Theoretical physicist Prof Stuart Wyithe is one of the world’s leading thinkers on the Universe as it was 13 billion years ago, when there were no stars or galaxies, just cold gas.
In the next few years astronomers will learn much more as powerful new telescopes come online.
The Universe is definitely getting bigger, faster—and astronomers using the Anglo-Australian Telescope in NSW have confirmed it.
The WiggleZ survey looked at over 200,000 visible galaxies (centre), but also gave insights into dark matter (the green grid that deforms the gravity field) and dark energy (the purple grid). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltec
The results are now in for WiggleZ, a survey of the night sky, spanning 200,000 galaxies and billions of years of cosmic history.
“This puts a nail in it. Clearly the universe is accelerating, and clearly there is something like dark energy,” says Prof Matthew Colless, director of the Australian Astronomical Observatory and a member of the WiggleZ team. Continue reading Massive galaxy survey confirms accelerating Universe→
The Murchison Widefield Array is a telescope with no moving parts. Credit: David Herne, ICRAR
Far outback in Western Australia, 32 tiles—flat, stationary sensors—each carrying 16 dipole antennas have begun collecting scientific data.
These first tiles will ultimately form part of a much bigger array of 512 tiles, the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA)—Australia’s second Square Kilometre Array (SKA) demonstrator project. Like CSIRO’s Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP), the MWA is being built at the remote, radio-quiet Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO). Continue reading Telescope of tiles→
CSIRO’s Parkes telescope records pulsar signals to try to detect gravitational waves. Credit: David McClenaghan / CSIRO
Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicts them, and they could be scattered throughout the Universe. But so far, gravitational waves— ‘ripples’ in the fabric of space and time—have never been detected. Several Australian teams of astronomers are trying to catch the first signs of one.
THE HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE CAN BE USED TO TAKE MEASUREMENTS THAT WILL HELP ANSWER SOME OF THE BIGGEST QUESTIONS ABOUT THE UNIVERSE. CREDIT: NASA/STSCI.
Scientific puzzles don’t come much bigger than these. How old is the Universe? How big is it? And what is its ultimate fate?
A single number, Hubble’s constant, is the key that can unlock all of those questions, but it’s a number that has proved notoriously hard to accurately measure. Hubble’s constant is the rate at which the Universe is expanding. The first team to accurately make that measurement was co-led by Jeremy Mould, now a professor at Swinburne University of Technology and professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne. Continue reading Measuring the Universe from start to finish→
WiggleZ will hunt for dark energy in the faint patterns of 293,000 distant galaxies. Credit: NASA / ESA / HUDF09 Team
A project to produce more than double the number of galaxy distance measurements than all other previous surveys, could lead to an explanation of one of nature’s biggest mysteries—whether dark energy, an invisible force that opposes gravity, has remained constant or changed since the beginning of time.
