Lithium is the heaviest element produced in Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN). As such, it is a unique element that can be used to study the conditions of the Big Bang. Standard BBN theory produced mostly hydrogen and helium, with trace amounts of lithium - about 1 in 10...Read More
Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are now showing their potential as a cosmological tool. The bursts were initially discovered with single dish radio telescopes like Murriyang (the 64-m Parkes Radio Telescope), as dispersed pulses of radio emission.Read More
The ESO Users Committee is an advisory body whose remit is to relay to ESO the experiences of the national communities, recommend improvements to ESO’s services, and communicate progress to their communities.Read More
Type 1 active galactic nuclei (AGN) show broad spectral lines, with characteristic velocities of several thousand kilometres per second. These are thought to come from a region (BLR – the broad-line region) of gas clouds close to the central black hole, but how these are distributed and orbit...Read More
The timescales in which star-forming galaxies deplete their gas is found to be short relative to the age of the Universe. This points to the conclusion that galaxies must have a way to replenish their gas reservoirs and indeed, early cosmological simulations reveal cold gas being channeled along...Read More
In 2019, a team of software engineers from Astralis-AAO (Macquarie University) and Astralis-AITC (ANU) took over the maintenance and upkeep of 19 data processing pipelines used by the VLT, as a part of the ESO Pipelines Project. Currently in its 3rd successful year, this project between ESO and...Read More
How were the heavy elements like uranium and gold produced? Until recently, neutron star mergers were the only confirmed source of the rapid neutron-capture (r-) process elements (roughly half of the elements heavier than zinc in the Periodic Table). Those events involve the merger of the remnants of...Read More
To infer the history of mass growth experienced by individual galaxies, their constituent stars need to be analysed based on their chemistry, ages, and present-day kinematics. Using stars in our Milky Way galaxy, where such information is readily available, many new discoveries have been made in recent years...Read More
The Milky Way is by far the best-studied galaxy in the Universe, with observations of it and speculation on its nature dating back thousands of years, including amongst Indigenous Australians. The disk nature of the Galaxy has been evident for at least a hundred years, with early maps...Read More
Galaxies in our present-day Universe form stars much less rapidly than they did in the past. Most of the stars in nearby massive galaxies formed during the ‘peak epoch of star formation’ – a period of cosmic history that occurred approximately 8-11 billion years ago, at redshift z≈1-3....Read More
