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. jtotheizzoe: Dark Matter and the Phantom Filaments Sounds like a good band name, eh? Simulations of how we think the universe is organized, astrophysically speaking, show patterns resembling nodes of clustered galaxies connected by filaments of dense matter. We’ve found plenty of the galaxy clusters, but the filaments have been harder to actually observe. That’s because they are likely made of dark matter, which neither emits or absorbs light (and is therefore invisible to we mere humans). But scientists may have witnessed the effect of one of these filaments recently, marking the first time that dark matter has been observed connecting galaxy clusters. As Matthew Francis reports: The researchers used archival data from the 8.2 meter Subaru telescope in Hawaii, which includes visible and infrared observations of the supercluster. These were scanned to look for subtle changes in the light from objects behind the clusters. These can be signs of weak gravitational lensing, which would reveal the distribution of dark matter near the clusters. Gravitational lensing basically means that something invisible with mass, like dark matter, is bending the light from the cluster of galaxies. So although we can’t see the dark matter, we can see it affecting the light’s path and take a pretty good guess it is there. I bet these guys wish they hadn’t announced this in the same week as the Higgs boson, but hey … can’t win ‘em all. It gives support to the idea that our universe could be built on enormous webs of dark matter, and where these filaments and strands intersect, there is where gravity pulls galaxies together to form the clusters of stars and visible matter that we see every time we look up at night. (↬ Ars Technica)

    jtotheizzoe:

    Dark Matter and the Phantom Filaments

    Sounds like a good band name, eh?

    Simulations of how we think the universe is organized, astrophysically speaking, show patterns resembling nodes of clustered galaxies connected by filaments of dense matter. We’ve found plenty of the galaxy clusters, but the filaments have been harder to actually observe. That’s because they are likely made of dark matter, which neither emits or absorbs light (and is therefore invisible to we mere humans).

    But scientists may have witnessed the effect of one of these filaments recently, marking the first time that dark matter has been observed connecting galaxy clusters. As Matthew Francis reports:

    The researchers used archival data from the 8.2 meter Subaru telescope in Hawaii, which includes visible and infrared observations of the supercluster. These were scanned to look for subtle changes in the light from objects behind the clusters. These can be signs of weak gravitational lensing, which would reveal the distribution of dark matter near the clusters.

    Gravitational lensing basically means that something invisible with mass, like dark matter, is bending the light from the cluster of galaxies. So although we can’t see the dark matter, we can see it affecting the light’s path and take a pretty good guess it is there.

    I bet these guys wish they hadn’t announced this in the same week as the Higgs boson, but hey … can’t win ‘em all. It gives support to the idea that our universe could be built on enormous webs of dark matter, and where these filaments and strands intersect, there is where gravity pulls galaxies together to form the clusters of stars and visible matter that we see every time we look up at night.

    (↬ Ars Technica)

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      Holy vaca!
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