Scientists have discovered the strongest evidence yet for a 13.2-billion-year old galaxy, a finding that provides a key piece of information about the universe’s early childhood. “This is the most distant (galaxy) identified with high confidence,” astronomer Wei Zheng, with Johns Hopkins University, told Discovery News. “If our current universe is a man of 70…
Spacetime may be less like beer and more like sipping whiskey. Or so an intergalactic photo finish may suggest. Physicist Robert Nemiroff reached this heady conclusion after studying the tracings of three photons of differing wavelengths that were recorded by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in May 2009. The photons originated about 7 billion light…
Dating features on the Moon and Mars is guesswork. Scott Anderson is building a tool to change that.
Astronomers have spotted the earliest known spiral galaxy, dating to just three billion years after the Big Bang. Theories of galaxy formation held that the Universe was still too chaotic a place to allow such a perfectly formed or “grand-design” spiral to form. It should take far longer for gravity to bring matter into thin,…
Scientists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory have carried out an experiment that has recreated a form of matter that pervaded the entire universe a fraction of a second after the Big Bang – the cosmic explosion that marked the origin of the universe. The experiment produced fundamental insights into laws pertaining to all visible matter….
Astronomers have found the faintest galaxy yet seen in the deep, distant reaches of space, an object whose light has taken 13 billion years to reach us. The tiny galaxy, which existed about 800 million years after the Big Bang created the universe, is among the top 10 most distant objects known. “This image is…
A new way to find a star’s age can give clues to how our Milky Way galaxy built itself up over billions of years from smaller galaxies, a U.S. astronomer says. Using a new technique, Jason Kalirai of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore has examined the burned-out relics of sun-like stars, called white…
Messages from the early Universe: Bright and brief, γ-ray bursts hold clues to cosmic history.
One of Europe’s main contributions to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is built and ready to ship to the US. The Mid-Infrared Instrument (Miri) will gather key data as the $9 billion observatory seeks to identify the first starlight in the Universe. James Webb – regarded as the successor to Hubble – is due…
Time, arguably our most precious nonrenewable resource, has a slippery nature in our minds. Sometimes it flows quickly. In other situations, it trickles at an unbearably slow pace. And, to the horror of many, it speeds as we age. Why should something as reliable as a ticking clock be perceived with such inconsistency? Claudia Hammond,…