Cosmology

Dark Matter Makes a Comeback

May 21, 2012

Recent reports of dark matter’s demise may be greatly exaggerated, according to a new paper from researchers at the Institute for Advanced Study.

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We Are In This Universe; The Universe Is In Us

May 9, 2012

The latest installment of the excellent Symphony of Science series is out, and like every one of them it’s a fun, inspirational and educational trip through the cosmos with voiceovers by leading astronomers and physicists. These are great, and if you haven’t seen the others be sure to check them out on creator John Boswell’s [...]

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Intelligent Alien Dinosaurs?

April 13, 2012

I for one welcome our alien dinosaur overlords…maybe. Dinosaurs once roamed and ruled the Earth. Is it possible that similar humongous creatures may have evolved on another planet – a world that DIDN’T get smacked by an asteroid – and later they developed to have human-like, intelligent brains? A recent paper discussing why the biochemical [...]

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Polar Telescope Casts New Light On Dark Energy And Neutrino Mass

April 5, 2012

Located at the southermost point on Earth, the 280-ton, 10-meter-wide South Pole Telescope has helped astronomers unravel the nature of dark energy and zero in on the actual mass of neutrinos — elusive subatomic particles that pervade the Universe and, until very recently, were thought to be entirely without measureable mass.

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Hubble Gets Best Look Yet At Messier 9

March 30, 2012

First discovered by Charles Messier in 1764, the globular cluster Messier 9 is a vast swarm of ancient stars located 25,000 light-years away, close to the center of the galaxy. Too distant to be seen with the naked eye, the cluster’s innermost stars have never been individually resolved… until now.

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Can “Warp Speed” Planets Zoom Through Interstellar Space?

March 24, 2012

Nearly ten years ago, astronomers were stunned to discover a star that had been apparently flung from its own system and travelling at over a million kilometers per hour. Over the years, a question was brought up: If stars can be ejected at a high velocity, what about planets? Avi Loeb (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) [...]

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VISTA View Is Chock Full Of Galaxies

March 22, 2012

See all those tiny points of light in this image? Most of them aren’t stars; they’re entire galaxies, seen by the European Southern Observatory’s VISTA survey telescope located at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. This is a combination of over 6000 images taken with a total exposure time of 55 hours, and is the widest [...]

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Rare Rectangle Galaxy Discovered

March 20, 2012

It’s being called the “emerald-cut galaxy” — recently discovered by an international team of astronomers with the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, LEDA 074886 is a dwarf galaxy located 70 million light-years (21 Mpc) away, within a group of about 250 other galaxies. “It’s an exciting find,” Dr. Alister Graham, lead author and associate [...]

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Hubble Spots Mysterious Dark Matter ‘Core’

March 2, 2012

Astronomers are left scratching their heads over a new observation of a “clump” of dark matter apparently left behind after a massive merger between galaxy clusters. What is so puzzling about the discovery is that the dark matter collected into a “dark core” which held far fewer galaxies than expected. The implications of this discovery [...]

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Journal Club – Theory constraint

February 11, 2012

According to Wikipedia, a journal club is a group of individuals who meet regularly to critically evaluate recent articles in the scientific literature. And of course, the first rule of Journal Club is… don’t talk about Journal Club. So, without further ado – today’s journal article is about how new data are limiting the theoretical options [...]

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Emerging Supermassive Black Holes Choke Star Formation

January 27, 2012

Located on the Chajnantor plateau in the foothills of the Chilean Andes, ESO’s APEX telescope has been busy looking into deep, deep space. Recently a group of astronomers released their findings regarding massive galaxies in connection with extreme times of star formation in the early Universe. What they found was a sharp cut-off point in [...]

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Planck Spacecraft Loses Its Cool(ant) But Keeps Going

January 17, 2012

After two and a half years of observing the Cosmic Microwave Background, the ESA Planck spacecraft’s High Frequency Instrument ran out of its on-board coolant gases over this past weekend, reaching the end of its very successful mission. But that doesn’t mean the end for Planck observations. The Low Frequency Instrument, which does not need [...]

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Wandering Stars Shed Light on Milky Way’s Past

January 11, 2012

Like a worldly backpacker, many stars in the Milky Way Galaxy have made interesting journeys, and have interesting stories to tell about their past. For over a decade, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has been mapping stars in our Galaxy. This week at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas, astronomers from University [...]

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Astronomers Witness a Web of Dark Matter

January 9, 2012

We can’t see it, we can’t feel it, we can’t even interact with it… but dark matter may very well be one of the most fundamental physical components of our Universe. The sheer quantity of the stuff – whatever it is – is what physicists have suspected helps gives galaxies their mass, structure, and motion, [...]

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Journal Club: On Nothing

January 7, 2012

According to Wikipedia, a journal club is a group of individuals who meet regularly to critically evaluate recent articles in scientific literature. Being Universe Today if we occasionally stray into critically evaluating each other’s critical evaluations, that’s OK too. And of course, the first rule of Journal Club is… don’t talk about Journal Club. So, [...]

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Unlocking Cosmology With Type 1a Supernovae

January 5, 2012

Let’s face it, cosmologists catch a lot of flack. It’s easy to see why. These are people who routinely publish papers that claim to ever more finely constrain the size of the visible Universe, the rate of its breakneck expansion, and the distance to galaxies that lie closer and closer to the edges of both [...]

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Guest Post: The Cosmic Energy Inventory

January 2, 2012

Editor’s Note: Markus Pössel is a theoretical physicist turned astronomical outreach scientist. He is the managing scientist at the Centre for Astronomy Education and Outreach “Haus der Astronomie” in Heidelberg, Germany. Now that the old year has drawn to a close, it’s traditional to take stock. And why not think big and take stock of [...]

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What if the Earth had Two Moons?

December 27, 2011

The idea of an Earth with two moons has been a science fiction staple for decades. More recently, real possibilities of an Earth with two moons have popped up. The properties of the Moon’s far side has many scientists thinking that another moon used to orbit the Earth before smashing into the Moon and becoming [...]

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Why Do We Live in Three Dimensions?

December 26, 2011

Day to day life has made us all comfortable with 3 dimensions; we constantly interact with objects that have height, width, and depth. But why our universe has three spatial dimensions has been a problem for physicists, especially since the 3-dimensional universe isn’t easily explained within superstring theory or Big Bang cosmology. Recently, three researchers [...]

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A Star-Making Blob from the Cosmic Dawn

December 21, 2011

Looking back in time with some of our best telescopes, astronomers have found one of the most distant and oldest galaxies. The big surprise about this blob-shaped galaxy, named GN-108036, is how exceptionally bright it is, even though its light has taken 12.9 billion years to reach us. This means that back in its heyday [...]

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