What existed before the big bang? What is the nature of time? Is our universe one of many? On the big questions science cannot (yet?) answer, a new crop of philosophers are trying to provide answers. Stephen Hawking may have famously declared that “Philosophy is dead.” but philosopher of physics Tim Maudlin disagrees. Maudlin, whose…
A team of astronomers has identified a new galaxy that may be made completely of dark matter, the second of its kind. In a discovery announced in January, an international team of researchers has found a dark dwarf galaxy about 10 billion light years from Earth. In the current issue of Nature, the team of…
Astronomers have determined that each of the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way probably has at least one companion planet, on average, adding credence to the notion that planets are as common in the cosmos as grains of sand on the beach. The finding underscores a fundamental shift in scientific understanding of planetary systems…
Galaxy clusters are the largest stable structures in our Universe. Seven billion light years away and with two million billion times the mass of our Sun, a cluster nicknamed “El Gordo” – “the Fat One” in Spanish – has been spotted and is said to be currently undergoing a merger and growing even larger. Galaxy…
Baby stars don’t get an easy ride during their early years; they are born into stellar nurseries bubbling with violence. One such nursery is the Cygnus X region of our galaxy, a nebula 4,500 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus the Swan. Cygnus X is known as one of the brightest radio-wave emitting sources in…
Astronomers have discovered the most distant developing galaxy cluster known to date, shedding light on the formation of large-scale structure in the early universe. Researchers used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to find five tiny but bright galaxies clustered together 13.1 billion light-years from Earth. That means Hubble is observing them as they existed just 600…
At least four times in the last few years, astronomers have announced they have found planets orbiting other stars in the sweet spot known as the habitable zone — not too hot, not too cold — where water and thus perhaps life are possible. In short, a so-called Goldilocks planet fit to be inhabited by…
At first glance, CS 22892-052 looks like a run-of-the-mill old star. Born about 13 billion years ago, only 700 million years after the big bang, it is lacking in many of the shinier, more interesting elements. But look closer, and you’ll see that this stellar granny is adorned with gold. Now Terese Hansen of the…
Two studies shed additional light on a murky question: How did the cosmic fog that enveloped the universe in its early days dissipate?
Astronomers may have, for the first time, directly imaged a planet still in the process of formation, gathering material from a debris disk surrounding its parent star.