Tag Archive for 'Universe'

Physicists seek to understand the underlying laws of the Universe. Image credit: Johnson Martin.

Paradox-Free Time Travel is Mathematically Possible: Study

Sep 25, 2020 by News Staff

Time travel with free will is logically possible in our Universe without any paradox, according to new research from the University of Queensland. Physicists...

Carbide Planets May Be Made Of Silica and Diamonds

Sep 11, 2020 by News Staff

Extrasolar planets hosted by stars with sufficiently high carbon-to-oxygen ratios could be made of diamonds and silica, according to new research by Arizona...

This Hubble image shows the massive galaxy cluster MACSJ 1206. Embedded within the cluster are the distorted images of distant background galaxies, seen as arcs and smeared features. These distortions are caused by the dark matter in the cluster, whose gravity bends and magnifies the light from faraway galaxies, an effect called gravitational lensing. This phenomenon allows astronomers to study remote galaxies that would otherwise be too faint to see. Overlaid on the image are small-scale concentrations of dark matter, represented in this artist’s impression in blue. Dark matter is the invisible glue that keeps stars bound together inside a galaxy and makes up the bulk of the matter in the Universe. These blue halos reflect how the galaxy cluster’s dark matter is distributed, revealed by new results from Hubble. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / G. Caminha, University of Groningen / M. Meneghetti, Observatory of Astrophysics and Space Science of Bologna / P. Natarajan, Yale University / CLASH Team / M. Kornmesser.

New Observations Suggest Missing Ingredient in Current Dark Matter Theories

Sep 11, 2020 by News Staff

The large mass of a galaxy cluster deflects light from background objects, a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. The large-scale gravitational lens...

SN LSQ14fmg exploded in SDSS J221646.15+152114.2, a star-forming galaxy 100 million light-years away. Image credit: Hsiao et al, doi: 10.3847/1538-4357/abaf4c.

Astronomers Observe Slowest Rising Type Ia Supernova Ever Seen

Sep 10, 2020 by News Staff

The exaggerated properties of a Type Ia supernova dubbed SN LSQ14fmg may help reveal the origin of the ‘super-Chandrasekhar’ group of supernovae it...

An artist’s impression of binary black holes about to collide. Image credit: Mark Myers, ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), Australian National University.

Astronomers Witness Birth of Intermediate-Mass Black Hole

Sep 2, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers using the twin LIGO detectors located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, and the Virgo detector located near Pisa, Italy, have...

SDSS J141637.44+003352.2, a dual quasar at a distance for which the light reaching us was emitted 4.6 billion years ago. The two quasars are 13,000 light-years apart on the sky, placing them near the center of a single massive galaxy that appears to be part of a group, as shown by the neighboring galaxies in the left panel. In the lower panels, optical spectroscopy has revealed broad emission lines associated with each of the two quasars, indicating that the gas is moving at thousands of kilometers per second in the vicinity of two distinct supermassive black holes. The two quasars are different colors, due to different amounts of dust in front of them. Image credit: Silverman et al, doi: 10.3847/1538-4357/aba4a3.

Astronomers Find Three Luminous Dual Quasars

Aug 27, 2020 by News Staff

Using the Subaru Telescope and W. M. Keck and Gemini observatories, astronomers have spotted three dual quasars — merging galaxy systems that have...

Will Universe End with ‘Black Dwarf’ Supernova Explosions?

Aug 20, 2020 by News Staff

A series of ‘black dwarf’ supernovae will be the last astrophysical events to occur in our Universe prior to the so-called heat death, when the Universe...

A reconstructed image of SPT-S J041839-4751.9. Image credit: ALMA / ESO / NAOJ / NRAO / Rizzo et al, doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-2572-6.

ALMA Finds Young Milky Way-Like Galaxy in Early Universe

Aug 13, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have discovered an extremely distant galaxy that looks surprisingly like our...

These pre-explosion (left panel and right top panel) and post-explosion (right bottom panel) images from Hubble show SN 2019ehk and its host galaxy Messier 100. The location of SN 2019ehk is marked by red lines and the alignment uncertainty is indicated by pink ellipses. Image credit: Jacobson-Galán et al, doi: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab9e66.

Astronomers Catch X-Rays from Calcium-Rich Supernova

Aug 5, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers have for the first time used X-ray imaging to examine a calcium-rich supernova. Their findings, published in the Astrophysical Journal, show...

An artist’s impression of the thin stream of stars torn from the Phoenix globular cluster, wrapping around the Milky Way (left). Wan et al targeted bright red giant stars (right) to measure the chemical composition of the disrupted Phoenix globular cluster. Image credit: James Josephides, Swinburne Astronomy Productions / S5 Collaboration.

Ancient Globular Cluster Was Tidally Disrupted by Milky Way Two Billion Years Ago

Jul 30, 2020 by News Staff

The Phoenix stellar stream, a thin over-density of stars in the halo of our Milky Way Galaxy originally identified by the Dark Energy Survey, is composed...

This artist’s impression shows the evolution of the Universe beginning with the Big Bang on the left followed by the appearance of the Cosmic Microwave Background. The formation of the first stars ends the cosmic dark ages, followed by the formation of galaxies. Image credit: M. Weiss / Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Study: Universe Might Be 1.2 Billion Years Younger

Jul 27, 2020 by News Staff

The Universe is assumed to be around 13.8 billion years old, but new calculations suggest it could be younger than that. This artist’s impression shows...

This composite image shows the edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 4217. Magnetic field lines (green), revealed by the VLA, extend far above and below the plane of the galaxy. Image credit: Y. Stein, Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg / NRAO / SDSS / KPNO / J. English, University of Manitoba / R.-J. Dettmar & A. Miskolczi, Ruhr-Universität Bochum / R.J. Rand, U.N.M. / J. Irwin, Queen’s University.

Radio Telescope Sees X-Shaped Magnetic Field of NGC 4217

Jul 21, 2020 by News Staff

An international team of radio astronomers has used data from NSF’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to generate a detailed map of the magnetic...

Sloan Digital Sky Survey Collaboration Releases New 3D Map of Universe

Jul 20, 2020 by News Staff

Astrophysicists and cosmologists from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) have released the largest 3D map of the Universe ever created, filling in the...

This new picture of the Cosmic Microwave Background, the oldest light in the Universe, was taken by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope. This covers a swath of the sky 50 times as wide as the Moon, representing a region of space 20 billion light-years across. The light, emitted just 380,000 years after the Big Bang, varies in polarization (represented here by redder or bluer colors). Image credit: ACT Collaboration.

Universe is 13.77 Billion Years Old, Astronomers Say

Jul 17, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers using NSF’s Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) have taken a fresh look at the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the oldest light in our Universe....

This two-panel illustration shows a black hole surrounded by a disk of gas, before and after the disk is partially dispersed. In the left panel, the ball of white light above the black hole is the black hole corona, a collection of ultra-hot gas particles that forms as gas from the disk falls into the black hole. The streak of debris falling toward the disk is what remains of a star that was torn apart by the black hole’s gravity. The right panel shows the black hole after the debris from the star has dispersed some of the gas in the disk, causing the corona to disappear. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.

Colliding Star Destroys Supermassive Black Hole’s Corona in Distant Galaxy

Jul 17, 2020 by News Staff

An international team of astronomers has watched as an X-ray corona of a supermassive black hole in the active galactic nucleus 1ES 1927+654 was abruptly...

The afterglow of GRB 181123B (marked with a circle), captured by the Gemini-North telescope. Image credit: Gemini Observatory / NOIRLab / NSF / AURA / K. Paterson & W. Fong, Northwestern University / Travis Rector, University of Alaska Anchorage / Mahdi Zamani / Davide de Martin.

Short Gamma-Ray Burst Localized to Extremely Distant Galaxy

Jul 16, 2020 by News Staff

An international of astronomers has observed an optical afterglow of a short gamma-ray burst, thought to be from the merger of two neutron stars, and localized...

ASKAP radio continuum image of ORC 1 (contours) overlaid onto a DES 3-color composite image. Two galaxies of interest: ‘C’ lies near the center of ORC 1 and ‘S’ coincides with the southern radio peak. Image credit: Norris et al, arXiv: 2006.14805.

New Class of Radio-Astronomical Objects Discovered: Odd Radio Circles

Jul 13, 2020 by Natali Anderson

An international team of astronomers has discovered an unexpected new class of radio-astronomical objects, consisting of a circular disk, which in some...

This Hubble image shows the free-floating evaporating gaseous globule J025027.7+600849. The color image is made up of observations from Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) in the near-infrared and optical parts of the spectrum. Three filters were used to sample various wavelengths. The color results from assigning different hues to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / R. Sahai.

Hubble Spots Rare ‘Free-Floating Evaporating Gaseous Globule’

Jul 13, 2020 by Enrico de Lazaro

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have captured an outstanding image of J025027.7+600849 (J0250 for short), a rare type of stellar...

Siraj & Loeb explore the possibility that accretion flares resulting from the tidal disruption of small Oort Cloud bodies by a putative primordial black hole could power an observable optical signal that could be searched for with the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time. Image credit: Sci-News.com / Zdeněk Bardon / ESO.

Astronomers Develop Method to Detect Tiny Black Holes in Outskirts of Our Solar System

Jul 13, 2020 by News Staff

Amir Siraj and Professor Avi Loeb from the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University have developed a new method to search for primordial black holes...

An artist’s impression of a pair of orbiting white dwarfs, ZTF J153932.16+502738.8. Image credit: Caltech / IPAC.

White Dwarfs are Primary Source of Carbon in Milky Way, Astronomers Say

Jul 7, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers have analyzed a few carbon-oxygen white dwarfs in Milky Way’s old open clusters, and their findings help shed new light on the origin of...

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