Mark Sinderberry is the new CEO of UniSport

UniSport Australia, the national peak body for university sport, has a new CEO.

Players in the AON Women's University Sevens, a UniSport event.

In today’s Higher Ed Daily Brief: Uni sport boss, galactic clash

New sport chief

UniSport Australia, the national peak body for university sport has a new CEO. Mark Sinderberry, who was the founding chief executive of the ACT Brumbies in 1995, will start is new role in December.

Forty three higher education institutions are members of UniSport, which runs national competitions in over 40 sports, and co-ordinates the participation of student athletes in international competitions.

Mr Sinderberry also spent six years as group CEO of the English premiership club Saracens, and four years as CEO of the Western Force.

David and Goliath of the heavens

Australian National University astronomers have made the most detailed observations yet of the slow motion clash between the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, which are the nearest galaxies to our own Milky Way, and visible to the naked eye.

Lead researcher Dougal Mackey said the team created an ultra-faint map of stars in the outer edges of the clouds using the dark energy camera on the 4m Blanco telescope in Chile which revealed the clouds have had repeated interactions with each other over billions of years.

“This fight is a lot like the one that David and Goliath could have had if the little guy didn’t have such good luck with his sling shot,” said Dr Mackey from the ANU’s Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

“The Large Magellanic Cloud is really beating up its smaller companion — the outer parts of the Small Cloud are strongly elongated both towards and away from the Large Cloud.”

The distribution of stars with different ages in the Small Cloud indicates possible unpleasant encounters with the Large Cloud stretching back several billion years.

“The Large Cloud has definitely not come away unscathed from these brawls, as the side closest to the Small Magellanic Cloud is heavily warped and pruned, and other parts of its outskirts show major distortions.”

The Magellanic Clouds are not visible in the northern hemisphere. They were first noted by Europeans when explorer Ferdinand Magellan sailed south around the bottom of South America on the first expedition to circumnavigate the world.