Why Study at Swinburne?

Top researchers and excellence in teaching

SAO is a program run by the Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing and the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Swinburne University of Technology. the Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing is one of Australia's largest astronomy and astrophysics teaching and research groups. All our staff are active research astronomers and our SAO teaching staff include two HiCi researchers (HiCi = high citation researcher, an honour awarded to researchers whose citations rank them in the top 0.5 per cent of researchers in their field globally) as well as recipients of various prestigious Australian Research Council grants. We have received a rating of 5 ('well above world standard') for our research in Astronomical and Space Science in the 2010 and 2012 Excellence in Research Australia exercise (and we expect to maintain this ranking in 2015!) Internationally, the Academic Raking of World Universities has ranked Swinburne as one of the top 75 universities in the world for its research in the field of Physics.

We are as excited and passionate about teaching as we are about research. SAO has won a number of prestigious local and national awards, including:

• a 2014 Open Universities Australia NOVA Award for online learning excellence, for our unit Galaxies and their Place in the Universe
• a 2012 Office of Learning and Teaching Citation, awarded by the Commonwealth Government, for outstanding contributions to student learning
• the 2012 Swinburne University Vice-Chancellor’s Teaching Award in recognition of our highly successful astronomy online program

Since 2012, Swinburne University has been in the world's top 400 universities as listed in the Academic Ranking of World Universities, having been in the top 500 since 2009. Swinburne continues to be recognized nationally as a leader teaching quality in the Victorian tertiary sector. The 2013 Good Universities Guide reflects Swinburne's strengths in science and research.

Wide-ranging expertise and excellent research facilities

With expertise in optical, infrared and radio astronomy, as well as computational and theoretical astrophysics, we observe and simulate the most exciting astrophysical phenomena. Our research strengths cover all major areas of astronomy, from cosmology and the large-scale structure of the Universe, to quasars and the most distant known galaxies, to clusters and groups of galaxies, down to our own Milky Way, its structure and fascinating contents including stars, planets, pulsars, neutron stars and globular clusters. Our astronomers have direct access to the twin Keck 10-metre telescopes, the world's largest optical telescopes in Hawaii. Swinburne is also home to 'swinSTAR' and the GPU-based 'gSTAR', two of Australia's most powerful supercomputers. These are excellent research tools in key areas of astronomy ranging from simulations of large-scale structure formation to the processing of enormous data volumes collected from radio telescopes.

Our instructors

We pride ourselves on the expertise of our SAO instructors - click here to read what inspired them to pursue a career in astronomy

Our students

Some of our students have told us about their journey through SAO - click here to read their stories

Our graduates

Whilst many SAO students enrol in our program because they simply want to study astronomy, many of our graduates end up in a wide variety of astronomy, science or teaching careers. For find out what some of our graduates are up to, follow this link

Swinburne astronomy news

For the latest news from the Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing click here
To explore our multimedia site for lectures, interviews, and movie previews click here