#spaceaustralia — Public Fediverse posts

Excited to share my first #SpaceAustralia feature article for 2026 about an exciting and ambitious project that is unfolding 1km below the surface in regional Victoria.

Last year, I had the incredible opportunity to visit the Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory (SUPL) with Dr Katie Mack and explore the ambitious efforts of the SABRE South experiment. Shielded from cosmic rays by a kilometre of rock, this lab offers the ideal conditions to search for the faint whispers of dark matter, which still accounts for 25% of all matter in the Universe—and yet remains completely undetected.

Check out the article (and yes, check out our funky boots in the clean room!) and keep a lookout for exciting news of the detectors switching on later in 2026.

https://www.spaceaustralia.com/feature/australias-dark-matter-quest

📸 F. Morrison / SUPL

#DarkMatter #ParticlePhysics #Astronomy #Astrodon #CosmicRays

Your Smartphone Can Measure Solar Storms! ☀️🧲

Industry researchers found a way to provide better global coverage of what dynamics are occurring in the turbulent ionosphere - a region of Earth's atmosphere that is affected by the Sun's activity. They did this by tapping into GPS signals transmitted between smartphones and satellites.

Check out my latest #SpaceAustralia article here: https://www.spaceaustralia.com/news/your-smartphone-can-tell-us-about-solar-storms

📸 Kast, Smith, Google Research Software Engineers

#Geomagneticstorms #ionosphere #GPS #Astrodon #Science #Smartphones

New Reads! 👀

Australian astronomers have used Murriyang (Parkes radio telescope) data to make the most precise measurements of the nearest millisecond pulsar to Earth.

This new data was then used by researchers using the NICER telescope aboard the International Space Station to help further constrain the mass, radius and equations of state of matter of the brightest millisecond pulsar in the sky.

Wrote a little article outlining these new results on #SpaceAustralia

https://www.spaceaustralia.com/feature/closing-earths-closest-millisecond-pulsar

📷 C. Knox/OzGrav/SwinburneUni

#RadioAstronomy #XRayAstronomy #Astrophysics #Astrodon #Pulsars

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are millisecond duration bursts of radio waves that travel across the Universe - and to date, we still are unsure what causes them (though, we have theories).

They were discovered in 2007 when looking for archival data collected by Parkes 📡

The three senior science authors who led the discovery, Duncan Lorima, Maura McLaughlin and Matthew Bailes have now published an overview of FRBs, and its great!

So nice to see undergrad student Ash Narkevic credited with their role in this huge discovery in science too!

Whilst we don't know what causes FRBs, we can use them as probes to 'weigh' the Universe with them! Wrote about this here: https://www.spaceaustralia.com/index.php/feature/we-found-it-fast-radio-bursts-shed-light-missing-matter

Read the FRB review article (Lorimer, McLaughlin, Bailes) here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10509-024-04322-6

📸 Lorimer et al. 2024 / J-P Macquart

#SpaceAustralia #FastRadioBursts #RadioAstronomy #Astrophysics #Astrodon