It’s another batch of newly discovered earth-like planets, according to NASA officials. U.S. space agency officials announced they have discovered another series of planets, the latest such planets to hit the space agency radar. The space agency said the latest discover reveals some of the smallest earth-like planets yet discovered. Space agency officials said the…
As we go back in time, we find that heat intensifies to such a level that all bonds that keep matter together break: no more molecules, atoms, atomic nuclei; even protons and neutrons get broken down to their constituent quarks. If we keep going back, we quickly reach a time when energies were beyond what…
Astronomers have determined that each of the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way probably has at least one companion planet, on average, adding credence to the notion that planets are as common in the cosmos as grains of sand on the beach. The finding underscores a fundamental shift in scientific understanding of planetary systems…
Galaxy clusters are the largest stable structures in our Universe. Seven billion light years away and with two million billion times the mass of our Sun, a cluster nicknamed “El Gordo” – “the Fat One” in Spanish – has been spotted and is said to be currently undergoing a merger and growing even larger. Galaxy…
Baby stars don’t get an easy ride during their early years; they are born into stellar nurseries bubbling with violence. One such nursery is the Cygnus X region of our galaxy, a nebula 4,500 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus the Swan. Cygnus X is known as one of the brightest radio-wave emitting sources in…
Astronomers have discovered the most distant developing galaxy cluster known to date, shedding light on the formation of large-scale structure in the early universe. Researchers used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to find five tiny but bright galaxies clustered together 13.1 billion light-years from Earth. That means Hubble is observing them as they existed just 600…
While we have a supremely accurate theory of what happened after our universe started in its super-hot, super-dense childhood, we are still in the dark about its birth. But after more than a half century of work scientists are, perhaps, finally ready to go before and beyond the big bang.
In fall 2009, the theoretical physicist Lawrence M. Krauss gave a talk about recent discoveries in cosmology that he engagingly titled, “A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing.” The popularity of the video, viewed nearly a million times on YouTube, prompted Krauss to develop the ideas in the talk into a…
Brian P. Schmidt, 2011 Nobel Physics Prize winner, discusses his SkyMapper project, which is currently scanning the southern sky in unprecedented detail and has a peak data rate of one terabyte per day. The Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder, an array of 36 radio telescope dishes being built in Australia, will generate two terabytes per…
The purpose of the simulation is to reproduce the entire evolution of a universe made largely of cold dark matter to see whether it produces the same structures that we see in ours—from the galactic structures to galactic clusters, galactic superclusters, and beyond.