For the very first time, a NASA spacecraft has detected matter from outside our solar system — material that came from elsewhere in the galaxy. This so-called interstellar material was spotted by NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX), a spacecraft that is studying the edge of the solar system from its orbit about 200,000 miles (322,000…
Frenetic star-forming activity in the early Universe is linked to the most massive galaxies in today’s cosmos, new research suggests. This “starbursting” activity when the Universe was just a few billion years old appears to have been clamped off by the growth of supermassive black holes. An international team gathered hints of the mysterious “dark…
Six world-renowned scientists explain the history of the universe and reflect on how this knowledge affects their perspective of the universe and our place in it.
For the first time, scientists have caught a glimpse of a comet’s final minutes before it was vaporized by the sun. The comet was flying at about 1.4 million miles an hour.
Why does our universe look the way it does? In particular, why do we only experience three spatial dimensions in our universe, when superstring theory, for instance, claims that there are ten dimensions — nine spatial dimensions and a tenth dimension of time? Japanese scientists think they may have an explanation for how a three-dimensional universe emerged…
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…
Taking a picture of a black hole, an object so gravitationally bound that not even photons of light can escape, sounds like an oxymoron, but astronomers are attempting to do just that. What they’re hoping to glimpse is something called the “event horizon” — the swirl of matter and energy that are visible around the…
A hail of Martian meteorites crashed to Earth last July, and collectors and scientists around the world are snapping up the ultra-rare rocks for display and study. The meteorites fell in the Moroccan desert in July and were recovered a few months later. Scientists confirmed that the rocks are Martian, presumably blasted off the Red…
Members of the public are being asked to join the hunt for nearby planets that could support life.Volunteers can go to the Planethunters website to see time-lapsed images of 150,000 stars, taken by the Kepler space telescope. They will be advised on the signs that indicate the presence of a planet and how to alert…