Research stories
Our staff and students have made major contributions to astronomy, mapping the structure and formation of the Milky Way, discovering planets orbiting other stars, measuring dark matter both within our Galaxy and in the wider Universe, and discovering the accelerating expansion of the Universe.
11 May 2018
A study led by The Australian National University (ANU) and the University of Crete in Greece has shed new light on the mystery of how our solar system formed.
27 Mar 2018
Dr Brad Tucker from ANU has seen the death throes of a star cocooned inside a dense shell of gas and dust, which ended in a violent explosion.
28 Nov 2017
Astronomers at The Australian National University (ANU) have created the most detailed radio image of nearby dwarf galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud,...
17 Oct 2017
Scientists from ANU and around the world have detected for the first time ripples in space and time, known as gravitational waves, from the collision of two...
21 Sep 2017
Scientists at ANU have produced the best estimate of Earth's elemental composition which will help them understand how the Earth formed 4.6 billion years...
24 May 2017
A team of international astrophysicists led by ANU has shown how most of the antimatter in the Milky Way forms.
1 Mar 2017
Far-away planet systems are shaped like the Solar System, with multiple planets aligning with the host star on a flat plain.
17 Nov 2016
An international team of astronomers has discovered a previously unknown major concentration of galaxies in the constellation Vela, which they have dubbed the...
23 Jun 2015
Astronomers have solved a mystery over small, unusually hot blue stars, 10 times hotter than our Sun, that are found in the middle of dense star clusters.
21 May 2015
The universe's benchmark explosions are much more varied than expected.
5 May 2015
Researchers at ANU have helped discover a strange exoplanet orbiting a small cool star 500 light years that away is challenging ideas about how planets form.
7 Apr 2015
More than 40,000 amateur astronomers have classified two million unidentified heavenly bodies found by the SkyMapper telescope at The Australian National...