Gargantuan Black Hole Baffles Scientists
A hunt for supermassive black holes reveals a monstrous one at the heart of galaxy NGC 1277, which may force theorists to rethink their understanding of black holes.
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Enormous Gas Filament Connects Galaxy Clusters
For the first time, ESA’s Planck space telescope has detected a bridge of hot gas connecting a pair of galaxy clusters 10 million light-years apart. Abell 399 and Abell 401, each containing hundreds of galaxies, are billions of light years away. The presence of hot gas linking them had already been hinted at in X-ray…
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Star Formation Sputtering Out Across the Universe
The rate of star formation in the universe has dropped to just 3% of its long-ago peak, and there’s no end in sight to the decline, a new study finds. A team of astronomers has determined that the rate of star birth peaked around 11 billion years ago, just 2.7 billion years after the Big…
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First Stars’ Light Seen Through Extragalactic Fog
Light from the very first stars in the universe has been measured – and there is less of it than previously thought. The discovery should help us better understand how the hot haze of hydrogen that existed shortly after the big bang transformed into the complex web of stars and galaxies we see today. Although…
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NASA’s Fermi Helps Calculate Number of Stars in Universe
Astronomers have measured the background light from all the stars in the cosmos and inferred the number of stars created since the dawn of the universe, Using observations from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, scientists discovered emissions from distant blazars – gamma ray-emitting supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. As matter falls into…
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Superbright Star Explosion Is Most Distant Known
A newly spotted ultra-bright star explosion burst onto the scene just 1.5 billion years after the big bang, making it the earliest known supernova. The event is one of two supernovae recently found in the distant universe. The other occurred a mere 3 billion years after the birth of the cosmos. Both explosions are so-called…
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Mystery Glow of Dark Matter Halos Fueled by Extragalactic Stars
Stars ripped from their home galaxies as they collide with other galaxies can get slung into giant invisible cocoons of dark matter, researchers say, which might explain mysterious radiation pervading the sky. These findings suggest the halos of dark matter surrounding galaxies are not completely dark after all, but contain a small number of stars,…
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1 Picture, 9,000 Megapixels, 84 Million Stars
The center of our galaxy, as seen by the powerful Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) instrument in northern Chile, has been captured in a digital image that represents the largest catalog of the stars there to date, some 84 million of them (10 times more than earlier catalogs). The original image covers…
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A Surprising Trend in Galaxy Evolution
NASA astronomers have discovered a stunning trend in galaxy evolution, according to a report from the space agency. The stunning trend in galaxy evolution goes back 8 billion years, say astronomers who looked at numerous galaxies through the Keck telescopes and NASA’s Space Telescope. “Astronomers thought disk galaxies in the nearby universe had settled into…
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Apollo Rocks Analysis: Solar Wind Made Moon Water
Analyzing grains of soil collected from three Apollo lunar missions, geochemists have figured out that the hydrogen in trace amounts of water on the moon’s surface probably came from solar wind, the outflow of positively-charged hydrogen from the sun. For decades, scientists didn’t find much hydrogen in the lunar samples that had been returned to…