The Search for Invisible Stars: The Most Elusive Objects in The Galaxy

Talks on Tuesdays is a live event series bringing big ideas, real experts, and curious minds together - at your favourite local venues. Think thought-provoking lectures, audience questions, and post-talk mingling over drinks and dinner.

This isn’t a uni lecture. It’s a social, intelligent night out.Come alone or with friends, leave with something to talk about.

Event Schedule:

6.30pm Arrival & Doors Open

7pm Lecture Starts

7.45pm Q&A

8pm Talk Concludes

8.30pm Event Closes.

*Please arrive close to 6.30pm

A La Carte menu and full bar available throughout the night - pay as you go.

Your Topic:
The Search for Invisible Stars: When we look out into the night sky, we see a dark, static canvas filled with flickering white specks. But if we could see the universe in radio waves, we would witness a violently dynamic cosmos full of invisible explosions, magnetic storms, and dying stars crashing into each other. For decades, catching these fleeting, energetic events was like looking for a needle in a cosmic haystack; the Universe is vast, and our field of vision was far too narrow.

Today, we are overcoming that obstacle by building massive, next-generation instruments right here in Australia. Telescopes like the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) act as ultra-wide-angle lenses, collecting terabytes of data per second to map the southern skies. By searching for a specific signature — the polarization of radio light — my research filters out millions of more common astronomical signals to hunt down the weirdest, most elusive objects in the galaxy.

But why do we build these enormous machines just to find tiny, barely visible stars? Because these extreme environments — from the magnetism-induced death spirals of binary stars to the violent flares of ultracool dwarfs — test the very limits of our understanding of physics. Studying these phenomena provides insights into how magnetic fields shape planetary systems (like the one we’re living in) and helps us map the energetic forces that can either nurture or destroy life on other worlds. More than anything, surveying this invisible Universe reminds us of the sheer, awe-inspiring scale of the unknown, and proves that we have only just begun to scratch the surface of what is out there.

Your Speaker:

Kovi Rose is an astrophysicist at the University of Sydney who uses radio telescopes to study distant stars that go snap, crackle, and pop. His research focuses on transient and variable radio sources, including using the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) to conduct wide-field circular polarisation surveys. Recently, Kovi’s work has centred on the detection of the coolest radio-emitting brown dwarfs to date (as featured in the New York Times) and discovery of the origin of mysterious, repeating radio signals from space (published in Nature Astronomy). His work spans the study of stellar magnetospheres, the mechanics of binary star systems, and study of how supernova explosions interact with their local environments. Outside of the observatory, he spends most of his time communicating science, hiking, and playing with his dog, Newton.