Science Illustrated

Science Illustrated delivers natural science, break through discoveries and an understanding of the world for the entire family. Packed with stunning photography and in-depth editorial it’s a visually spectacular gateway to the world looking into the beginning of life to distant objects in the universe.

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Science Illustrated Australia

Fire power: Hunga Tonga before the blast

Endangered Aussies: tracking northern quolls

Stars mostly exist in pairs • The majority of binary star pairs were born together from the same cloud of dust and gas.

Stars swallow their own planets • Planets in alien solar systems can get so close to their stars that they get swallowed. According to new research, the process happens more frequently than astronomers used to think likely.

Sucking in a million tonnes of CO2 a year • In Scotland, the world’s biggest CO2 collection plant is in the pipeline.

Citizen science is successful in more ways than one, finds study

New tool will help black-hole hunters re-examine old data • A new Australian-developed algorithm simplifies the search for supermassive black holes using old data and new.

Iceland is the remains of a sunken continent • Iceland may not have been formed by volcanoes. Geologists now suspect that it is the tip of a flooded continent.

Enigmatic giant object reshuffles the Milky Way • A huge gas cloud raises questions about our galactic neighbourhood, and could give the Milky Way a fifth arm.

Can’t fly, but looks great – how vanity grounded this big-headed pterosaur • Good looks seem to have trumped the ability to fly, according to fossil finds of a pterosaur which evolution grounded some 100+ million years ago.

Did Australia have birds bigger than emus and cassowaries? • Aside from ostriches, Australia today is home to the largest birds in the world. But was there ever anything bigger, and what happened to them?

TOP 5 • Which stars are the largest in the universe?

What is a superpressure balloon? • “I read that ‘superpressure’ balloons can maintain their altitude high up in the atmosphere day and night. Is that possible, and how would it work?”

How are dinosaurs weighed? • How can scientists know the weight of a dinosaur when they clearly can’t weigh one?

The world’s most toxic tree? • “Here’s a picture [below] of a sign in Wingham Brush Nature Reserve, warning of stinging trees. Are there any trees more toxic than these?”

WHAT IS THIS? • The world’s first genuine millipede

Which is our strongest muscle? • Are our muscles equally strong when compared to size? Or is one the strongest?

…there’s a five-second rule for dropped food? • Is it true that food from the floor can be eaten without any health risk if it was on the floor for no more than 5 seconds?

WHAT’S NEXT FOR THE JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE? • After a delay of 14 years, NASA gave global astronomers a big Christmas Day present by launching the biggest space telescope yet into space. Once fully operational, the James Webb Space Telescope should show us things – and times – that we have never seen before.

Telescope unfolded in space • The James Webb telescope has travelled 1.5 million kilometres into space on its 29-day journey. En route, it has gradually unfolded, getting ready to take otherwise unachievable pictures of our universe.

Mirrors to capture invisible light • With the telescope unfolded into its final position, the individual mirrors are tweaked to nanometre precision to bring all 18 segments into perfect alignment. Then the mission can truly begin, with the primary mirror capturing infrared light, which the secondary mirror directs to the instruments.

5 mysteries to solve • Thousands...