The Astronomical Society of Australia

22/10/2025

Join our inaugural workshop about the history of Australian astronomy. Free admission. You do not have to be a member to join this workshop.

28/07/2025

Last week marked three years until the 2028 Australian eclipse! ☀️🌑🌏

In just under three years, on 22 July 2028, Australia will experience one of nature’s most breathtaking phenomena – a total solar eclipse.

What makes this eclipse especially significant is that almost a quarter of Australia’s population, including over 70% of New South Wales’ population, live within the path of totality – the narrow track where the Sun will be completely eclipsed.

Incredibly, the 2028 eclipse will be the first of four total solar eclipses that will cross the Australian continent between now and 2038. The next three eclipses will take place in 2030, 2037 and 2038.

🔗 Read more here:

THREE YEARS TO GO Countdown Begins to Australia’s Spectacular Total Solar Eclipse   24th July 2025 In just under three years, on 22 July 2028, Australia will experience one of nature’s most breathtaking phenomena – a total solar eclipse. For millions of Australians, this will be a once-in-a-l...

15/07/2025

🏅 Charlene Heisler Prize for Outstanding PhD Thesis 🏅

Detecting gravitational waves with pulsar timing
Dr Matthew Miles, Swinburne University of Technology (now Vanderbilt University)

Dr Matthew Miles’ pioneering work explores the use of pulsar timing arrays as galactic-scale gravitational wave detectors.

His prize-winning thesis, “Millisecond pulsar timing and gravitational wave searches with the MeerKAT radio telescope”, makes a significant discovery of a rare “mode changing” phenomenon in a precisely timed millisecond pulsar and develops a method to account for it. This has substantially improved timing accuracy.

Matthew’s research also produced the first data release for the MeerKAT pulsar timing array, laying crucial groundwork for future gravitational wave detections with next-generation facilities like MeerKAT and the SKA.

Congratulations, Matthew! 👏 🎉 🏆

11/07/2025

🏅 Anne Green Prize for a Significant Advance or Accomplishment by a Mid-Career Scientist 🏅

Models of galaxy formation across cosmic epochs
Associate Professor Claudia Lagos, ICRAR / The University of Western Australia

Associate Professor Claudia Lagos is a world leader in modelling the formation of galaxies. She is the main developer of SHARK, an influential open-source semi-analytic model of galaxy formation, which has led to breakthroughs in our understanding of the complex physics that governs galaxy formation and evolution.

It has been used to address two outstanding problems in extragalactic astrophysics: the mysterious nature of highly dusty galaxies and how to explain the high abundance of very massive galaxies in the early Universe, when it appears too young for these galaxies to have formed.

📖 Learn more about SHARK: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/? /2018MNRAS.481.3573L/abstract

Congratulations, Claudia! 👏 🎉 🏆

11/07/2025

🏅 Emerging Leaders in Astronomy Software Development Prize sponsored by Australian Research Data Commons 🏅

Cosmic pulses and stellar bursts: a tool for decoding radio transients
Dr Joshua Preston Pritchard, CSIRO

Dr Joshua Preston Pritchard is the sole designer and developer of DStools, a processing pipeline package specifically designed for radio interferometric data. Since its 2024 release, DStools has already been instrumental in at least five refereed publications in high-impact journals, including Nature and Nature Astronomy.

The package is an outstanding contribution to open-source astronomical software, which constructs and analyses dynamic spectra, providing an incredibly rich source of information for studying short-timescale radio variables and transients.

💻 Check out the code here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15232974

Congratulations, Joshua! 👏 🎉 🏆

10/07/2025

🏅 Bok Prize for Outstanding Research by an Honours Student or eligible Masters Student 🏅

Our wandering neighbours – the Hercules stream
Li Yusen, The Australian National University

A group of stars, the Hercules stream, are in our solar neighbourhood but heading on a very different track to our sun, and most stars in the Milky Way.

Li Yusen has confirmed that this stream of stars originated with the ‘bar structure’ at the heart of the Milky Way and are now heading out towards the edges of our galaxy.

His Honours thesis, "Orbital dynamics in barred Milky Way: the dynamical and chemical origin of the Hercules stream", led to two original, published papers—an impressive feat for an Honours student.

His research presented a straightforward picture on the orbital level of the origin of the Hercules stream. He used a dynamical approach to confirm the favoured scenario that the Hercules stars are on very large but stable orbits that bring stars out from the inner galaxy to pass through the solar neighbourhood and showed that these stars share chemical properties consistent with this scenario.

The solar neighbourhood comprises more than 8 million stars within 3000 light years of our solar system. About a quarter of those neighbourhood stars are in the Hercules stream.

Congratulations, Yusen! 👏 🎉 🏆

09/07/2025

🏅 Louise Webster Prize for Outstanding Research by a Scientist Early in their Post-Doctoral Career 🏅

Galactic winds stopped big galaxies from growing in the early Universe
Dr Rebecca Davies, Swinburne University of Technology

For years, astronomers have observed that powerful winds, known as galactic outflows, are blown out from galaxies by exploding stars and supermassive black holes. These winds are thought to be key to shaping galaxies by ejecting gas that would otherwise form new stars. However, when observed primarily through electrically charged gas, these winds appeared surprisingly weak.

Dr Rebecca Davies used data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to look back 10 billion years and study the neutral phase of galactic outflows in 60 massive galaxies in the early Universe, just when star formation was stopping.

Rebecca found that at least half of these massive galaxies drive gas outflows, and the outflows expel neutral gas up to 100 times faster than it is converted into stars. This means these outflows were likely powerful enough to rapidly quench star formation in their host galaxies.

Her findings, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, demonstrate that JWST can be used to study the previously undetectable neutral phase of distant outflows, and challenge previous studies of outflows at Cosmic Noon: 2 billion to 4 billion years after the Big Bang. Rebecca is now leading a new James Webb observing program to directly measure how these gas outflows deplete the cold gas needed for star formation.

📖 Read the paper here: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024MNRAS.528.4976D/abstract

Congratulations, Rebecca! 👏 🎉 🏆

08/07/2025

We are pleased to announce the recipients of the 2025 Astronomical Society of Australia Awards 👏

🏅 Bok Prize for outstanding research in astronomy by an Honours or eligible Masters student
Awarded to Li Yusen for his Honours thesis: “Orbital dynamics in barred Milky Way: the dynamical and chemical origin of the Hercules stream”. Li Yusen completed his Honours thesis at The Australian National University, supervised by Ken Freeman and Helmut Jerjen.

🏅 Charlene Heisler Prize for the most outstanding PhD thesis in astronomy
Awarded to Dr Matthew Miles (Swinburne University of Technology, now at Vanderbilt University, USA) for his thesis “Millisecond pulsar timing and gravitational wave searches with the MeerKAT radio telescope” supervised by Ryan Shannon.

🏅 Louise Webster Prize for outstanding research by a scientist early in their post-doctoral career
Awarded to Dr Rebecca Davies (Swinburne University of Technology) for the paper: JWST reveals widespread AGN-driven neutral gas outflows in massive z~2 galaxies 2024, MNRAS, 528, 4976.

🏅 Anne Green Prize for outstanding research by a mid-career researcher
Awarded to A/Prof Claudia Lagos (The University of Western Australia) for her work of modelling the formation of galaxies across cosmic epochs.

🏅 Emerging Leaders in Astronomy Software Development Prize (sponsored by the Australian Research Data Commons)
Awarded to Dr Joshua Preston Pritchard (CSIRO) for Dstools: a processing pipeline package for radio interferometric data from ATCA, ASKAP, MeerKAT and VLA

🏅 Ellery Lectureship
Awarded to Prof Naomi McClure-Griffiths (The Australian National University) for her expertise in atomic hydrogen gas distribution and evolution in our galaxy, the Milky Way, and its neighbours, the Magellanic Clouds.

🔗 Find out more in the official media release by Science in Public:
https://www.scienceinpublic.com.au/media-releases/asa2025

Congratulations to all our prize winners! 🙌

Many thanks to all our judges, and our Prizes Coordinator Tanya Hill, for devoting a considerable amount of their time to reading and reviewing the nominations 🌌