Free Astronomy Public Lectures

Presented by Associate Professor Chris Blake on 11th October 2013.

As we peer out into space, what is the most distant light we can see? The answer is the cosmic microwave background radiation, the faint afterglow of the hot Big Bang across the sky, which has travelled for almost 14 billion years to reach us. Within the microwave background, at the edge of the observable Universe, we can see the tiny ripples out of which galaxies such as our own later formed. In this talk, Assoc. Prof. Chris Blake from Swinburne's Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing will explain the crucial importance of this faint radiation for establishing our modern picture of the Universe, and will describe recent breakthrough measurements from the European Space Agency's Planck satellite.

Presented by Dr Pamela Gay on 13th September 2013.

In order to handle the onslaught of data coming from space and ground-based telescopes, many astronomers are turning to the public for aid. The team behind the new CosmoQuest virtual research centre is building a first of its kind research community for professional and citizen scientists to work together on advancing our understanding of the universe; a community of people who are participating in doing science, and in learning about this cosmos we share. Working with NASA's Dawn, LRO, MESSENGER, and STScI teams, this facility is developing citizen science projects that accomplish needed tasks for mission science teams. It also provides a rich educational context through online classes, virtual star parties, and community collaboration areas. This talk will overview the history of citizen discovery and discuss CosmoQuest and how you can help discover our universe.

Presented by Syed Uddin on 9th July 2013.

Just over a century ago the fixed stars we see in the night sky were the limit of the entire Universe. The Universe was assumed to be static. Now we have discovered that our Universe is not only expanding but is also accelerating. Galaxies play an important role here. In this talk I will describe how our knowledge about the Universe as a whole is evolving over time with emerging techniques and technologies.

Presented by Dr Jonathan Whitmore on 17th May 2013

Two foundational physical theories of science: Quantum Physics and General Relativity are counterintuitive descriptions of reality. They also form the foundation upon which much of our modern technology depends: from MRI machines, to lasers, to GPS. The methods of science are not the methods of common sense -- in fact, relying on common sense will almost assuredly lead down a false path. This talk will include a brief history of the scientific method, its stunning successes over the centuries. It will conclude with examples of some of the strange features of both Quantum Physics and General Relativity.

Presented by Professor Rafael Guzman on 3rd May 2013.

The GTC is the last -and the largest- of the new generation of large ground-based observatories that have opened up a new era of discoveries in astronomy at the dawn of the XXIst Century. The GTC has been built by a consortium of institutions from Spain, Mexico and the University of Florida. In this talk, I will review the general characteristics of this state-of-the-art telescope. I will also describe the main contributions of the University of Florida to its world-class instrumentation, and will present the first scientific results ranging from the birth of the universe to the detection of new planets to be obtained after its first light.

Presented by Anna Sippel on 19th April 2013.

Stars don't shine forever - and especially very massive stars don't live very long before ending their lives as neutron stars or black holes. In this lecture we will focus on the endpoints of the evolution of such massive stars and how a black hole can be formed during a stellar explosion called supernova. We will discuss how black holes of different sizes can be detected under certain circumstances, and implications for theories that stellar-mass black holes could be the seeds of supermassive black holes we find at the centres of galaxies like our Milky Way.

Presented by Assoc. Prof. Sarah Maddison on 22nd March 2013.

When we look up into the night sky, almost all the light we see comes from stars: single stars, stellar clusters, and even giant ensembles of stars that make up galaxies. How and where do stars form? How and why do they evolve? And what is the fate of stars? In this talk we will go on a journey through the life of star, from their birth to death, and learn about the important role that stellar evolution plays in both galaxies and life.

Presented by Pierluigi Cerulo and Nicola Pastorello on 15th February 2013.

As part of a 14 billion years old expanding universe, we are able to directly experience only a tiny part of its history. In order to reconstruct the evolutionary history of the universe, it is fundamental to study the properties of objects which are billions of light years away from us. In fact, the light coming from these galaxies travels at a finite speed, giving us a picture of how they were when the universe was much younger. However galaxies are complex systems that evolve as they form new stars and interact with each other. As galaxies become old they acquire an apparently featureless elliptical morphology that, despite its structural simplicity, encloses all the complexities involved in galaxy evolution. Likewise a collection of family portraits that tells about the human society at the time when the pictures were taken, the observation and the subsequent comparison of nearby and distant elliptical galaxies allow us to reconstruct the evolution of the universe. In this talk we will present some results from the ongoing research conducted at Swinburne on nearby and distant galaxies with the most powerful currently available telescopes such as Keck, Gemini and Hubble.

Presented by Dr Lee Spitler on 7th December 2012.

Through a visual journey, you will travel with an astronomer, Dr. Lee Spitler, on an observing trip to the remote 6.5-metre Baade Magellan Telescope. In the still Chilean night, you will collect astronomy data to hunt for galaxies billions of light years away from Earth. Learn about the trials and tribulations of a professional astronomer.

Presented by Dr. Rita Tojeiro on 23rd Nivember 2012.

Over the last few decades astronomers have made enormous leaps in charting the Universe around us. Now, with accurate positions for millions of galaxies, we are finally able to trace the Cosmic Web in which we live. But these cosmic maps do far more than simply catalogue the contents of our Universe - they can help us to understand its origin and evolution as well as its ultimate fate. Cosmologist Dr Rita Tojeiro takes us on a voyage to the furthest reaches of space and explains how astronomers are unlocking some of the fundamental secrets of the Universe.

Presented by Prof. Richard de Grijs on 26th October 2012.

Studying galactic interactions is like sifting through the forensic evidence at a crime scene. Astronomers wade through the debris of a violent encounter, collecting clues so that they can reconstruct the celestial crime to determine when it happened. Take the case of Messier 82, a small, nearby galaxy that long ago bumped into its larger neighbour, Messier 81. When did this violent encounter occur? New infrared and visible-light pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope reveal for the first time important details of large clusters of stars, which arose from the interaction. The talk focuses on the train wrecks resulting from galaxy collisions and the implications for us in the Milky Way.

Presented by Associate Professor Darren Croton on 5th October 2012.

Black holes are amongst the most bizarre objects predicted by Einstein's theory of General Relativity. Many people may not realise that our own galaxy hosts a supermassive black hole at its centre that is three million times more massive than our own Sun! In this talk Associate Professor Darren Croton discusses the physics of black holes and their formation, how they can grow to become so massive, active black hole "quasars" in the distant universe and the unexpected impact that a supermassive black hole can have on the evolution of an entire galaxy. We will finish by side stepping into the exotic world of wormholes, the black hole's tormented cousin.

Presented by Prof. Karl Glazebrook on 9th September 2012.

On Sep 17th 1912 Vesto M. Slipher at Lowell Observatory measured the first redshift of a galaxy and established their large velocities, this laid the groundwork for Hubble's discovery of the expansion of the Universe. One hundred years later we have measured close to 2 million galaxy redshifts (about one third of these measured in Australia) and this has been fundamental to our understanding of the structure of the Universe. In this public lecture, Professor Karl Glazebrook will tell the story of how galaxy redshift surveys have transformed our picture of cosmology and what the future might entail.

Presented by Professor Jeremy Mould on 20th July 2012.

Dome A on the Antarctic Plateau may be the best site for astronomical telescopes on Earth, In the Mawson centennial year we should note that Australians have been pioneers in collecting these site test data. We now have an opportunity to join a Chinese project to build a 2.5 metre telescope at Dome A. This would be the most powerful infrared survey telescope anywhere. A two-micron survey of the southern hemisphere would find targets for spectroscopy with NASA's successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, JWST. We would detect the first generation of stars to form in the Universe after the Big Bang and see the powerful supernovae that produce the first black holes.

Presented by Christina Blom-Smith on 12 June 2012.

Despite their uniform appearance elliptical galaxies often have complex and disturbed formation histories. Without the presence of gas, dust and star formation, that we see readily in spiral galaxies, it can be extremely tricky to probe their intriguing formation histories. It is vital to understand how they form since elliptical galaxies contain the highest proportion of stars in the universe and the largest ones uniformly dominate galaxy clusters. Christina Blom, 3rd year PhD student at Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing will take you on a tour of our efforts to unravel the mysteries of elliptical galaxies and share some of our recent successes.

Presented by Catarina Ubach and Francesco Pignatale on 25th May 2012.

Solar System bodies such as planets, meteorites and comets are all created from small grains during the protoplanetary disk phase. The chemical composition of all these objects is intrinsically related to the chemistry of gas and grains in the parent disk. In the first part of the lecture we will explore the evidence we have to understand grain growth in discs. In the second part of the lecture we will go through the chemistry of discs and how thermodynamics can help us to understand the formation of our Solar System and the bulk composition of exoplanets orbiting stars different from our Sun.

Presented by Assoc. Prof. Chris Blake on 18th April 2012.

Scientists have been trying to understand the building blocks of matter for millenia. What are the fundamental particles and forces that shape the sub-atomic world? Even today, we are faced with a series of puzzles and challenges that could overturn our view of reality. What particle makes up the dark matter? What are neutrinos, and do they really trave l faster than the speed of light? What caused the slight imbalance between matter and anti-matter, leading to a Universe in the first place? Powerful particle accelerators, such as the Large Hadron Collider, are striving to answer these questions. However, by peering into the distant Universe we can find the ultimate particle accelerator of them all: the Big Bang. In this talk we will explore how observations to the edge of the Universe can test our theories about the smallest particles that exist, and may change our views about the fundamental nature of reality.

Presented by Professor Shri Kulkarni on 28th March 2012.

That occasionally new sources ("Stella Nova") would pop up in the heavens was noted more than a thousand years ago. The earnest study of cosmic explosions began in earnest less than a hundred years ago. Stella Novae are now divided into two major families, novae and supernovae (with real distinct classes in each). Equally the variable stars have a rich phenomenology. Together, supernovae and variable stars have contributed richly to key problems in modern astrophysics: distances to galaxies, cosmography and build up of elements in the Universe.

The Palomar Transient Factory (PTF), an innovative 2-telescope system, was designed to explicitly to chart the transient sky witha particular focus on events which lie in the nova-supernova gap.

Presented by Dr Michael Shara on 14th Feburary 2012.

This is based on a current exhibition a the American Museum of Natural History that Dr Michael Shara has curated. Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration offers a vision of space travel as it boldly explores our next steps in our solar system and beyond.

Presented by Assoc. Prof. Sarah Maddison on 20th October 2011.

The clockwork-like motion of the planets around the Sun is well understood thanks to Newton's universal law of gravitation. Using Newtonian physics and some simple mathematical equations, we can describe (and predict) the motion of a planet around the Sun. The solution to this "2-body problem" allows us to determine the location of an orbiting body at any time in the future. But when we add just one more body, the situation becomes a lot more complex. Our Solar System hosts a rich variety of dynamics, including the Kirkwood gaps in the asteroid belt, intricate structures in Saturn's rings, and the resonant orbits of Jupiter's Galilean satellites. In this talk we will discuss some of these interesting phenomena and how gravity shapes the Solar System.