A long time ago, in our galaxy, there was a rare, very violent explosion. We may never know what it was: it could have been an especially large supernova (star explosion) or a collision between two neutron stars, and it was at least 100 million years...

Iron-60 discovery in Antarctic ice reveals: Local Interstellar Cloud leaves its mark Our Solar System is currently passing through the Local Interstellar Cloud, a region of highly diluted gas and dust between the stars. On its path, Earth continuously...

Forget needles in haystacks: if you’re looking for a million billionth of a gram of a radioactive isotope, hidden, say in sea water, coral, or the antler of a deer – then accelerator mass spectrometry is the tool for you! In this episode...

As Dr Dominik Koll was investigating a new method of radio-dating ancient samples, he stumbled across evidence of a major event in the Earth’s history, around ten million years ago. “It was completely unexpected. I was just dating an environmental...

This episode Dr Christian Notthoff is in the control room breaking glass. With silver and gold 'bullets'. Sounds a bit anarchic, but the result is silicon dioxide membranes with tiny holes that can be used as sensors and filters, and put to uses such...

Nuclear physicists deal with not just the 118 elements of the periodic table, but all the isotopes of those elements, which takes the numbers into the thousands. In this episode of Megavolts we chat with Dr Stefan Pavetich about how they keep track...

Australia is set to play a leading role in the global hunt for mysterious dark matter, with the launch of a new lab in regional Victoria today. The Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory (SUPL) will be the new epicentre of dark matter research in Australia...

Today’s visit to the HIAF Control room finds Associate Professor Stephen Tims researching sedimentation in the catchment of a lake in China. It seems to have nothing to do with nuclear physics - but thanks to the nuclear weapons tests in the 1950s,...

A thin layer of plutonium that encircled the globe during the first nuclear weapons tests in the fifties could mark the dawning of a new geological age, experiments in the Heavy Ion Accelerator Facility show. Human impact on the planet has reached the level...

How do you find the remnants of violent cosmic events? Look at the bottom of the ocean of course! PhD student in nuclear physics, Dominik Koll, is searching for tiny traces of plutonium-244 and iron-60. Each of these originate in different cosmic events,...

The first-ever discovery of rare plutonium-244 on earth has scientists rethinking the origins of the elements on our planet. The tiny traces of radioactive plutonium-244 were found in ocean crust alongside radioactive iron-60. The two isotopes are evidence...

A mystery surrounding the space around our solar system is unfolding thanks to evidence of  supernovae found in deep-sea sediments. Professor Anton Wallner, a nuclear physicist at ANU Research School of Physics, led the study which shows the Earth...

An international team of scientists has found evidence of a series of massive supernova explosions near our solar system, which showered the Earth with radioactive debris. The scientists found radioactive iron-60 in sediment and crust samples taken from...