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Talk about a giant in the universe.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was the first person to realise the abundance of hydrogen in the stars and the universe at large. She would overcome the adversity that faces women in academia to blaze a trail through physics and become one of the most important figures in the history of astrophysics.
Astronomers used multiple telescopes to confirm the double quasars.
It's stunning what you can produce with enough computational power.
If galaxies were human, GN-z11 would want you to get off its lawn.
This immense simulation is so complex that scientists have observed phenomena that had not been programmed explicitly in the code.
The breakthrough validates our current models of how the universe works.
The number of photons emitted into space is 4 followed by 84 zeroes. Now, that a moment to wrap that figure around your head.
What is being seen is that the universe is expanding faster nearby than we would expect based on more distant measurements.
We've learned a lot about the early universe.
It was floating around where we estimated it would be.
The Universe is flat, according to modern research. But what does that mean?
We may have dramatically underestimated what lies in the Universe.
Seeing is believing.
Zoom out far enough, and the Universe is a pretty homogenous place.
The European Space Agency's Planck satellite has revealed some information which may force us to rethink the evolution of the early Universe.
Astronomers working with the Hubble telescope have discovered that the Universe is expanding 5-9% faster than expected, and this is intriguing.
Scientists have completed the most precise measurement of the Universe's rate of expansion to date; but the result just isn't compatible with speed calculations from remanent Big Bang radiation. Should the former results be confirmed by independent techniques, we might very well have to rewrite the laws of cosmology as we know them.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope jointly used their instruments to identify the oldest galaxy yet seen. Dubbed EGS8p7, this unusually luminous galaxy was formed just 600 million years after the Big Bang. When you peer that far into space and time, you're bound to find some freaky stuff. EGS8p7 did no disappoint. Already, the 13.2 billion-year-old galaxy is raising questions about how we think the Universe evolved during its infancy.
Astronomers have discovered the oldest known stars lurking in a super-luminous galaxy - they may very well be among the very first objects that formed in the history of the Universe.
A team of astronomers from Yale and the University of California-Santa Cruz have looked back in time, discovering a galaxy that was formed when the Universe was only 5% of its current age. This is now the farthest, and youngest galaxy known to date.
Many people change a lot after their youth... and so to did our Universe. Nowadays, galaxies contain both dust and gas, but back in the early Big-Bang days, the earliest galaxies had no dust, only gas. Now, a team of astronomers has discovered a very young galaxy with lots of dust - the equivalent of a white-bearded young man.
Climate change is a threat to all life and vegetation here on Earth, but some places are worse off than others. Take Mongolia for instance. Over the past 30 years, a quarter of the country's surface has turned into a desert, while 850 lakes and 2,000 rivers have dried out. This rapid desertification has severely disrupted habitats, making it very difficult for both man and beast to adapt. Even to this day, 25% of Mongolians living in the country are thought to be nomadic, still holding on to ancient traditions from the times when the great Khans swept the world and made it tremble, from Beijing to Rome. In the face of such diversity, the Mongolian people risk losing their heritage and way of life, as they've come to know it for thousands of years.
A newly published study has revealed that dark matter is being swallowed up by dark energy, offering valuable data not only about the nature and structure of these mysterious entities, but also about the future of the Universe. Dark Matter and Dark Energy In case you’re wondering, dark matter and dark energy are not Star Trek […]
The Illustris project took 5 years of software development and 3 months running on 8000 processors – but it sure was worth it – the result is truly monumental! Now, researchers finally have an accurate model of the development of the universe, which even though is rough around some edges, still blends in well with today’s […]
A new map of a slice of the Universe was recently released by BOSS – Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey – and it’s the most accurate and comprehensive one so far. The map plots the location of some 1.2 million galaxies with an astonishing accuracy of 99%, nothing short of spectacular – remember, each of these […]
In a black hole, Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity clashes with quantum physics; for decades, scientists have tried to find a way to bridge the cap between these monumental theories, but so far, they simply seem irreconcilable. But the conflict could be solved if our Universe were in fact a holographic projection. String theory, dimensions […]
It is currently believed that we live in a lopsided Universe: cosmologists reached this conclusion by examining the detailed structure of the left over radiation from the Big Bang. Now, two cosmologists presented data which seems to suggest that our Universe is actually curved slightly, in a saddle-like fashion; if correct, their model would invalidate […]
Using the incredible Planck cosmology probe astronomers at the European Space Agency have assembled a map of the “oldest light” in the sky – the cosmic microwave background (CMB) that was thrown into space in all directions just a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang and which is still picked up here on Earth today. […]
A metal poor star located in the Milky Way galaxy, “just” 190 light years away from our Sun is 14.46+-0.80 billion years old – nearly as much as the age of the Universe! All stars follow a stellar evolutionary path; by knowing some parameters about the star (such as mass, luminosity, and surface temperature), astronomers […]
So, remember that Higgs boson discovery we got all excited about a while ago? You know, validated the Standard model, proved our understanding of the subatomic world not wrong, and all that? Turns out, that same data could very well be an obituary for our Universe – at least that’s what Joseph Lykken of the […]
A startling study, which looked at data 10 times more comprehensive compared to previous similar efforts, found that half of all the stars that have ever existed were created between 9 and 11 billion years ago, with the other half created in the years since. What this means is an exponential fall in new stars being […]
Previously, we shared the largest and, respectively, most detailed 3-D maps of the Universe released by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Now the survey has released a new, massive update to the map, again, making it the largest 3-D map of the Universe, which pinpoints the locations and distances of over a million galaxies. Were you […]
Quasars are some of the brightest objects in the Universe. Their formed after black holes devour captured material, like gas dust and stars that come too close, and release bright light that can be seen across the universe. Most of the popular astronomy today is orientated towards the particularly extremely bright quasars; those formed in a singular […]
Astronomers have discovered the most distant quasar known so far, dubbed ULAS J1120+0641, powered by a supermassive black hole with a mass 2 billion times that of our sun – it’s also the brightest object in the known Universe. At a redshift of 7.1, placing it at only 770 million years after the Big Bang, the newly discovered […]
While a 3D map of the Universe using the light from 14,000 quasars has been previously released to the public by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which is considered the largest map of the known Universe, another version has been recently unveiled which scientists claim to be the most complete map. Called the 2MASS Redshift […]
Unveiled this past weekend, astronomers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have created a 3D map of the Universe using the light from 14,000 quasars, some of the brightest bodies in the universe, to illuminate gas clouds in regions of space some 11 billion light years away. From the study‘s abstract: These features arise as […]
I was quite pleasantly surprised by Universe in a Sandbox. It is one of the best pieces of software I’ve come across lately; you get the ultimate power, create and destroy galaxies, run virtually any astronomic simulation you want, but most of all, you get to explore and learn about the very universe you live […]
A new study suggests that a blunder of cosmic proportions has been made when estimating the total number of stars in the universe; the research points out that a specific kind of galaxy has 10 times more red dwarf stars than previously estimated. This would not only triple the number of stars throughout the universe, […]
Two studies put Einstein’s theory, the General Theory of Relativity to a test unlike any other before. The two teams used extensive observations from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to analyze galaxy clusters, the biggest objects in the Universe that are bound together by gravity (at least, that we know of). The first team produced results […]
Two years ago, researchers reported the strange movement of hundreds of galaxy clusters moving in the same direction at about 3.6 million kilometers per hour. Current spatial movement models can’t explain this in any way, so at the time, they launched a strange hypothesis: clusters are being tugged by the gravity of something outside our […]
Whether intelligent life exists in our universe is a long debated problem. But for some scientists, there’s something even more interesting than that: is there life in another universe? A definite answer is impossible, especially since it’s not even clear if such a universe exists, though researchers have speculated such an existence for more than […]
ESO’s Very Large Telescope has shown something that scientists concluded is the signature of the explosion of the object furthest away from Earth we have found so far, a redshift of 8.2; it’s estimated that the explosion took place more than 13 billion years ago (!!), just 600 million years after the Big Bang. They […]
A few days ago, something remarkable has been captured by NASA’s telescopes, as an unusual set of Gamma rays were picked up by the Swifst satellite. What’s so remarkable about the find is that the respective burst of Gamma rays is the farthest such discovered, and, according to NASA’s specialists, originated from an explosion near […]
