Cosmologist Dr Philip Matthews draws on Indigenous astronomy to contemplate our place in the universe while visiting North West Australia's Kimberley region.

Cosmology is the study of the origin, evolution and ultimate fate of our universe and is tied to human understanding of what the universe is, and where we are in it.

The Emu in the Sky lines up with a rock carving in New South Wales. ( Supplied: Barnaby Norris )

It is in this mix of science and philosophy that a lot that can be learnt from people who have contemplated the universe for millennia; Dr Matthews said Indigenous Australians had more time for this kind of contemplation than almost any other.

"Indigenous people had a good life for 40,000 or 50,000 years, who knows. But they had no major ice ages to worry about, so they had a lot of time for storytelling," Dr Matthews told Vanessa Mills on ABC Kimberley Local Radio.

Dr Matthews said it is hard not to get thinking about how we came into existence when looking up at the stars and planets and contemplating Indigenous creation stories.

"In New South Wales, their creation stories are about the greater and lesser turtle that came across the ocean. Whereas, in Western Australia a lot of creation stories for Indigenous people are serpent-based," Dr Matthews said.

Aboriginal astronomy is a different way to view the universe than the ancient Greek-based framework more common in the broader Australian community.

"They [Indigenous Australians] did things a bit differently; they saw gaps in the dots of light, such as the great emu," Dr Matthews said.

"It's clearly an emu once you can see it. Most of the other constellations that were designed by either Egyptians or Greeks, they don't look like what they're meant to look like."

The expanding understanding of our universe

Western ideas of cosmology have changed radically since Copernicus first proved the earth was not the centre of the universe.

In the 1920s Edwin Hubble first showed that the universe extends beyond our Milky Way galaxy.

Dr Matthews said today's cosmologists have to grapple with the modern understanding that the universe is large almost beyond contemplation.

"Now the universe is extremely vast with trillions of galaxies. So one thing that does is expand your horizons about who lives here," he said.

This portrait of the universe's history is called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (or HUDF) and is a minuscule patch of sky first targeted by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2002 and revisited over and over again since then. ( hubble25th.org )

Dr Matthews likes to quote the famous Danish physicist Niels Bohr when he describes how the limits of the universe are on the edges of scientific understanding.

"He famously said that 'anyone who thinks they're understanding physics just isn't trying hard enough' because there's some bizarre stuff about the universe," he said.

The immense scale of the universe makes the probability of alien life a near certainty according to Dr Matthews, but also means we will probably never meet.

"The speed of light is actually pretty slow, and it's as fast as you can go. But it's still slow for getting anywhere interesting ... It's just too vast, I don't think we'll ever get to meet an alien."