StarStuff

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About Me

Hi, I'm Stuart Gary, I'm a journalist and broadcaster with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. I love science, especially the majesty and wonder of space, so I put together a weekly astronomy show for the ABC called StarStuff.

In my spare time I like to fly planes, practice karate and pistol target shooting and play around with my cars, a twin Turbocharged Falcon GT Interceptor and a DeTomaso Pantera GTS.

I’m vegan, a life member of the RSPCA and a supporter of several animal welfare organisations.

My other great passion is music which is understandable when you realise that I was a radio music jock long before I became a journalist. My record library contains tens of thousands of singles, albums, videos, CD’s and DVDs. These days that’s all stored in an 8 terabyte raid enclosure linked to a desk top PC at home. My tastes range from rock and grunge through to trance and new romantics. At the moment I’m listening to heaps of MGMT, William Control, Hawthorne Heights and Short Shack, but I have lots of time for the classics like Placebo and the early stuff from Silverchair, In fact Neon Ballroom is still my favourite album, and Emotion Sickness is still one of my two favourite songs (the other being William Control’s Death Club).

StarStuff is a great name for the show, but it works on more levels than just astronomy, it’s really cool for any science program because everything in the universe after the quark gluon plasma of the big bang is star stuff even the iron which makes your blood red was manufactured in the supernova explosions of stars. Carl Sagan said it best, we are all star stuff.


This blog is designed to allow me to publish all the things which can’t fit into StarStuff. There’s heaps of really interesting stuff out there and only a half hour window for the show, so each week becomes a battle to try and squeeze it all in. This blog lets me do that.

You can check out the show at the offical ABC StarStuff website:
http://www.abc.net.au/science/starstuff/

There's also an official ABC StarStuff Twitter feed: @abcstarstuff

And an official ABC Science website: http://www.abc.net.au/science/


The legal stuff: This is my personal blog. The views expressed in this blog are those of me only and not the Australian Broadcasting Corporation or its management. I do not claim ownership of any of the media in this blog. where possible credit and or source will always be given. If one of your photos or other media is submitted in this blog and you would like it removed please let me know.

Blogs I follow:

Theme by: Miguel
  1. astrodidact: Andromeda Galaxy- Our Milky Way galaxy will no longer take the shape of a barred, spiral galaxy when the enormous Andromeda Galaxy merges with us. Andromeda currently lies approximately 2.6 million light years away and is heading towards our galaxy at around 80 miles per second. I wouldn’t worry just yet as this collision will take place in 3.5 billion years; that’s how far away Andromeda is. It’s size is estimated to be around 200,000 light years in diameter and is measured to contain nearly one trillion stars. By comparison, our own galaxy probably has close to 400 billion stars. This picture beautifully shows the center of the Andromeda surrounded by hot blue stars, which are usually very massive and have short lives. Just like our own galaxy, it is believed that at the center of Andromeda lies a supermassive black hole. Imagine a region of space only 5 light years in diameter (Roughly the distance to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri), that contains the mass of 10 million stars. This enormous amount of mass can not be explained by what is seen visually through stars, gas and dust. Measuring stars near the core of active galaxies has proven that those stars nearest the core are orbiting “something” at speeds near 3,000 miles per second. For contrast, our sun orbits the center of the Milky Way at 135 miles per second. The numbers sort of speak for themselves and further proves the existence of supermassive black holes in the center of galaxies such as our Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies.

    astrodidact:

    Andromeda Galaxy- Our Milky Way galaxy will no longer take the shape of a barred, spiral galaxy when the enormous Andromeda Galaxy merges with us. Andromeda currently lies approximately 2.6 million light years away and is heading towards our galaxy at around 80 miles per second. I wouldn’t worry just yet as this collision will take place in 3.5 billion years; that’s how far away Andromeda is. It’s size is estimated to be around 200,000 light years in diameter and is measured to contain nearly one trillion stars. By comparison, our own galaxy probably has close to 400 billion stars. This picture beautifully shows the center of the Andromeda surrounded by hot blue stars, which are usually very massive and have short lives. Just like our own galaxy, it is believed that at the center of Andromeda lies a supermassive black hole. Imagine a region of space only 5 light years in diameter (Roughly the distance to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri), that contains the mass of 10 million stars. This enormous amount of mass can not be explained by what is seen visually through stars, gas and dust. Measuring stars near the core of active galaxies has proven that those stars nearest the core are orbiting “something” at speeds near 3,000 miles per second. For contrast, our sun orbits the center of the Milky Way at 135 miles per second. The numbers sort of speak for themselves and further proves the existence of supermassive black holes in the center of galaxies such as our Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies.

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