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ANU PhD scholar Peter Swanton is using Indigenous knowledge of our night skies to unlock the secrets of our universe, and inspiring young people along the way. Hannah Dixon ANU Reporter Deputy Editor For generations, Indigenous knowledge of the stars has been shared through storytelling, dances, songs and other oral traditions.

Most of a planet's water is generally not on its surface but hidden deep in its interior. This affects the potential habitability of distant worlds, as shown by model calculations of researchers at ETH Zurich and Princeton University. We know that the Earth has an iron core surrounded by a mantle of silicate bedrock and water (oceans) on its surface.

Planets are bodies that orbit a star and have sufficient gravitational mass that they form themselves into roughly spherical shapes that, in turn, exert gravitational force on smaller objects around them, such as asteroids and moons. For most of human history, the only planets our ancestors knew of were those they could see in the night sky.

This view of Jupiter was captured by the JunoCam instrument aboard NASA's Juno spacecraft during the mission's 62nd close flyby of the giant planet on June 13. Citizen scientist Jackie Branc made the image using raw JunoCam data. Credit: Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS. Image processing: Jackie Branc (CC BY)" Using data from the Advanced Stellar Compass (ASC) star tracker cameras aboard NASA's Juno, this graphic shows the mission's model for radiation intensity at different points in the spacecraft's orbit around Jupiter.

Previously thought to be negligible, the Sun-s magnetic activity is influencing the determination of its seismic age, as shown by a study published by an international team led by a researcher from the University of Geneva. An international team of astronomers, led by a researcher from the University of Geneva , has shown that the Sun-s magnetic activity has a significant influence on its seismic characterisation, contrary to predictions in the literature.

An international research team has identified the specific origins of most of the Martian meteorites that are now on Earth. They've traced the meteorites to five craters where they were launched off Mars after impact. The craters are located within two volcanic regions on the red planet called Tharsis (the region containing Olympus Mons, the largest shield volcano in the solar system) and Elysium.

A team of geoscientists, including members from the Archaeology, Environmental Changes and Geo-Chemistry large research unit of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, has investigated traces of the asteroid impact that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. The team examined samples from the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary layer, which marks the extinction of 70% of all species that existed at the time, including the dinosaurs.

An international team of scientists, including a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University's McWilliams Center for Cosmology and Astrophysics , has discovered the origin of a persistent radio emission observed alongside a fast radio burst. The new study, led by the  Italian National Institute for Astrophysics  (INAF), reveals that the radiation is generated by a bubble of plasma.

This artist's concept shows a hypothetical white dwarf, left, that has exploded as a supernova. The object at right is CWISE J1249, a star or brown dwarf ejected from this system as a result of the explosion. This scenario is one explanation f. Credit: W.M. Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko" They used data from NASA's WISE telescope, which later became the NEOWISE mission, to discover the faint, fast-moving object zooming out of the Milky Way.

A Yale supercomputer is helping astronomers resolve a longstanding question about the sizes of galaxies and the environment in which they live. A team of astronomers using a Yale supercomputer have determined for the first time that galaxies in denser environments are as much as 25% larger than their counterparts in less dense regions of the universe.

For decades, scientists have known that some galaxies reside in dense environments with lots of other galaxies nearby. Others drift through the cosmos essentially alone, with few or no other galaxies in their corner of the universe. A new study has found a major difference between galaxies in these divergent settings: Galaxies with more neighbors tend to be larger than their counterparts, which have a similar shape and mass, but reside in less dense environments.

The Dutch Black Hole Consortium has launched an 8-language version of the BlackHoleFinder app that citizens all'over the world can use to help identify newly formed black holes. Previously, the app was only available in Dutch and English. Now Spanish, German, Chinese, Bengali, Polish, and Italian have been added, greatly increasing the number of people who can access the citizen science app in their native language.

Adapted from a by Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. In a major step for the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) , scientists have detected the first neutrinos using a DUNE prototype particle detector at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab).

Here's a batch of fresh news and announcements from across Imperial. From new treatment targets for balance problems, to space weather missions, here is some quick-read news from across Imperial. Space weather mission  researchers will be building kit for a new space mission to understand a component of the solar wind and how it interacts with the Earth to create potentially dangerous 'space weather'.

Scientists have developed a new method for detecting supermassive binary black holes, pairs of the largest kind of black holes in the Universe and located at the very centre of galaxies. The new technique will require a deci-Hz gravitational-wave detector and would enable astronomers to study supermassive black hole binaries, which might otherwise remain inaccessible.

Astronomers have discovered that red dwarf stars can produce stellar flares that carry far-ultraviolet (far-UV) radiation levels much higher than previously believed. The discovery suggests that the intense UV radiation from these flares could significantly impact whether planets around red dwarf stars can be habitable.

An international team of astrophysicists with participation of the University of Zurich proposes a novel method to detect pairs of the biggest black holes found at the centers of galaxies by analyzing gravitational waves generated by binaries of nearby small stellar black holes. The origin of supermassive black holes found at the centers of galaxies, is still one of the biggest mysteries in astronomy.

In young planetary systems, gas giants form more efficiently and faster than previously assumed as shown by new computer simulations. Ring-shaped perturbations in disks of gas and dust orbiting young stars can trigger the formation of several gas giants, as researchers from the ORIGINS Cluster of Excellence, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Göttingen report in the current issue of the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

The barely-there lunar atmosphere is likely the product of meteorite impacts over billions of years, a new study finds. While the moon lacks any breathable air, it does host a barely-there atmosphere. Since the 1980s, astronomers have observed a very thin layer of atoms bouncing over the moon's surface.

Knowing where to look for this signal will help researchers identify specific sources of the potent greenhouse gas. Ozone can be an agent of good or harm, depending on where you find it in the atmosphere. Way up in the stratosphere, the colorless gas shields the Earth from the sun's harsh ultraviolet rays.