Physics News Archive

New light shines on dark mystery

The science world’s highest international honour was awarded in October to the leaders of two research teams that identified a mysterious and potentially profound phenomenon known as dark energy, an unseen force driving the universe apart
Swinburne's gSTAR heralds 'mega science'

The search that culminated in the discovery of a diamond planet in our Milky Way galaxy earlier this year came after researchers sifted through more than a thousand billion bytes of coded data.
Bionic eye hope from a touch of light

People cannot see nanoparticles, but nanoparticles may one day help people to see. Microscopic gold nanoparticles fixed to optical nerves and assembled to respond to different laser light wavelengths could become the key to bionic vision
Industry PhDs to boost solar power

Unlike many students who finish intensive doctoral studies to then face the daunting task of job hunting in academia or industry, Boyuan Cai and Yinan Zhang have their career paths already mapped
Know what a galaxy is? Think again

Despite being the most prominent objects in the visible universe, there is in fact no standard definition of a galaxy – at least, not one that satisfies most astronomers.
Cosmic map maker plots the unseen universe
One of Australia's most cited astronomers, best known for determining the precise value of Hubble's Constant, is the latest star recruit to join Swinburne's astronomy powerhouse. Swinburne's agreement with the powerful Keck Observatory in Hawaii
Big Bang survivors send astronomy back to the drawing board
Early in its life the universe underwent an epoch of explosive star formation, its infant galaxies sparkling with vitality as stars clumped and supernovae crackled amid swirling penumbras of gas and dust.
A bestiary of galaxies
Since the advent of radioastronomy in the 1930s, astrophysicists have been able to observe galaxies not merely through the brilliance of their visible light, but increasingly across every accessible wavelength in the electromagnetic spectrum.
Light harvesting offers new vision

Amplifying light in a nano-landscape provides the key to a new generation of super sensors
Game on: pixel power adds muscle to galactic science

Australia’s lead in global astronomy will be boosted through a multi-million-dollar upgrade to Swinburne’s supercomputer research facility, gSTAR.
The power balance shifts quickly among supercomputers. Continually jostling for position
How a trail of darkness leads to a planet born

An team of astronomers has laid the groundwork for watching a far distant planet in the act of being born. Their work is refining the study of the disks of dust that enfold newborn planets, creating a clearer view of cosmic birth.
Our cannibal galaxy
To see its starfields hung in radiant splendour across the night sky, you would scarcely suspect the Milky Way of being a cannibal, a gigantic buzz-saw of a galaxy that has chopped its neighbours into bits and ingested their fragments into its own
Photosynthesis comes into the light

In one-quadrillionth of a second a plant can take the sun’s light and transfer it to the chlorophyll molecules (which give the plant its green pigmentation) in its light-harvesting centre.
Immune system fails on video
As we live and breathe, millions of T-cells that are part of a human body's molecular defence force patrol the blood and lymphatic systems, seeking out and destroying cells harbouring viruses, bacteria or mutant cells that could turn cancerous.
It's eat or be eaten

The heart of a normal galaxy is a place of extreme astrophysical phenomena, where hapless stars can be devoured in a flash or fired across the universe at blinding speed.
Cold Waves

At temperatures less than a millionth of a degree above absolute zero, or about minus 273 degrees, atoms in a gas behave in the most peculiar fashion. They enter the quantum realm, becoming less like matter and more like light waves.
Dark mysteries lure cosmic surveyors
The Milky Way's parade across Earth's night sky offers a glittering view of our home galaxy and a glimpse of the billions of galaxies in the cosmos beyond.
Diabetes hope on the wings of silver cicadas

Browsing the research posters at a scientific conference in 2002, Paul Stoddart was taken aback. Before him was an electron micrograph of a cicada wing that showed line after line of microscopic pillars arrayed on the wing's surface
Medical diagnosis at a pinch
Suspended in mid-air, a solitary red blood cell is rotated, stretched and folded in half. Then the light goes out. In darkness, the cell resumes its disc-like shape. With the light back, the cell is again subjected to forces that change its shape.
All aboard the time giant
Swinburne University of Technology astrophysicists have just booked themselves a ticket on the world's biggest 'time machine', capable of reaching back 12 billion years to the earliest phases of the universe when galaxies were first formed
Disease arms-race looks to powerful new X-ray tools
If you slice a second into a million billion femtoseconds, then 20 femtoseconds would be proportionate to the duration of a single eye blink within the 300,000 years since humans diverged from Neanderthals. It is an unimaginably brief timespan.
Giant energy burst reveals new cosmic horizons

A cryptic blast of radio energy from deep space lasting just thousandths of a second has astonished astronomers - and, tantalisingly, may offer a new way to observe how the universe unfolded.
Atom chip to open frontiers unknown
In an ultrahigh-vacuum chamber at Swinburne University of Technology, a million ultracold rubidium-87 atoms hover just beneath the surface of a silicon chip coated with a thin magneto-optical film.