The primordial particles of matter that existed just after the big bang are now being re-created in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to advance understanding of the kind of matter that existed in the first seconds of the universe. Seconds after the big bang, quarks and gluons — basic building blocks of matter — were…
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…
Billions of times the mass of our own sun, so-called massive black holes present a baffling mystery with clues hidden at the very dawn of existence.
The Higgs boson-like particle whose discovery was announced on 4 July looks significantly more certain to exist. The particle has been the subject of a decades-long hunt as the last missing piece of physics’ Standard Model, explaining why matter has mass. Now one Higgs-hunting team at the Large Hadron Collider report a “5.9 sigma” levels…
Hot stars booted out of their galactic homes may be responsible for creating the conditions that led to today’s universe
Where do ultra high-energy cosmic rays come from? These charged particles zoom to Earth from outer space, but why is a mystery. Now a possible source – gamma-ray bursts, which seemed to have been ruled out – have received a new lease of life. Gamma-ray bursts are usually created by exploding stars, which produce neutrinos….
A seven metric ton particle detector parked for over a year on the International Space Station (ISS) aims to establish whether there is an unseen “dark universe” woven into the cosmos, the scientist leading the project said. And the detector, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer or AMS, has already broken all records in registering some 17…
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…
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,…
Astronomers have made a crucial step towards a scientific goal by observing the heart of a distant quasar with angular resolution. An international team of astronomers connected radio telescopes in Chile, Hawaii and Arizona for the first time using the technique of Very Long Baseline Interferometry, enabling them to make the sharpest observation ever of…