An international team of researchers have developed a new technique to measure dark matter, using a state-of-the-art simulation of the Milky Way to test their mass-measuring method before applying it to real data. This threw up a number of surprises: they noticed that standard techniques used over the past twenty years were biased, always tending…
The largest 3D map yet of the universe’s huge galaxies and bright black holes may serve as a springboard toward solving some of astronomy’s greatest mysteries, its creators say. The map uses new data to reveal the locations of more than a million galaxies over a total volume of 70 billion cubic light-years. David Schlegel…
Hot stars booted out of their galactic homes may be responsible for creating the conditions that led to today’s universe
When NASA’s Kepler space telescope started finding planets at odd angles to their parent stars, scientists wondered if our solar system’s tidy geometry, with the planets neatly orbiting around the sun’s equator, was an exception to the rule. That idea can be laid to rest thanks to an innovative use of the Kepler data which…
Four pairs of what astronomers are calling “impossible stars” — stellar twins in orbits so close they defy explanation — have been found in our Milky Way galaxy, scientists say. Astronomers using the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope in Hawaii discovered the four star pairs, each of which is a binary system in which two stars…
Unsociable galaxies are unusual. Astronomers think that galaxies grow from scraggly clusters of stars to elegant spirals like the Milky Way by merging and pooling their resources. Loner galaxies like NGC 4178, which has spent most of the lifetime of the universe avoiding the company of other galaxies, are useful tools for disentangling how this…
The equivalent of an MRI of the sun was created by scientists, who studied high-resolution images of the sun’s surface taken by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory showing motions on the sun’s surface caused by convection. The findings challenge our existing explanations of the formation of sunspots and magnetic field generation.
Some 460 light-years away in the constellation Centaurus, a thick disk of dust swirled around a young star named TYC 8241 2652 1, where rocky planets like our own were arising. Then, in less than 2 years, the disk just vanished. That’s the unprecedented observation astronomers report in a new study, out today. Even more…
A duo of planets some 1,200 light years from earth have been spotted passing within 1.2 million miles of each other, closer than any other known pair of planets, a new study has found.
Physicists investigating the make-up of the universe are closing in on the Higgs boson, an elusive particle thought to have been key to turning debris from the Big Bang into stars, planets and finally life, scientists said. Researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) are using their large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s…