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Category: Astronomy

Could the oldest human story really be 100,000 years old?

Could the oldest human story really be 100,000 years old?

Mihai Andrei writes: For as long as humans have existed, they have looked to the sky. There are thousands and thousands of different myths and legends linked to stars and constellations, but one radical new idea says that one such story could be incredibly old. The legend is linked to the Pleiades, a set of stars that many cultures call the “Seven Sisters”. But look at them with the naked eye and you’ll only see six; so where’s the seventh…

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Apollo vs Artemis: How the Earth changed in 58 years

Apollo vs Artemis: How the Earth changed in 58 years

Richard Hollingham writes: After the Apollo 8 crew captured the iconic Earthrise photo in 1968, Artemis astronauts have recreated the image, revealing changes to our fragile blue planet. When the commander of Apollo 8, Frank Borman, first saw the far side of the Moon from his spacecraft window in 1968 he was struck by its desolate appearance. “The lunar surface was terribly distressed with meteorite craters and volcanic residue,” he told me during a BBC interview in 2018. “It was…

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Universe’s expansion rate cannot be explained by current physics

Universe’s expansion rate cannot be explained by current physics

Live Science reports: There’s a central crisis in cosmology: Different measurements yield different values for the expansion rate of the universe. Now, a comprehensive analysis combining decades of independent measurements suggests that this discrepancy is not due to error or uncertainty; instead, it’s a potential pathway to new physics beyond the standard cosmological model. Astronomers calculate the universe’s expansion rate, or Hubble constant, in two ways. One method is to use measurements of the distance to the cosmic microwave background…

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Ancient star opens window to early days of the universe

Ancient star opens window to early days of the universe

UChicago News reports: Not all archaeologists study ancient pottery and arrowheads. If you’re a stellar archeologist, you seek the oldest stars in the universe—those born long before our own sun and planet came into being. A group led by University of Chicago scientists has discovered a star that appears to date back to the second generation of stars ever formed. Still inside the tiny primordial galaxy where it was first born, it has a unique elemental makeup that can tell…

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Largest image of its kind shows hidden chemistry at the heart of the Milky Way

Largest image of its kind shows hidden chemistry at the heart of the Milky Way

European Southern Observatory (ESO): Astronomers have captured the central region of our Milky Way in a striking new image, unveiling a complex network of filaments of cosmic gas in unprecedented detail. Obtained with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), this rich dataset — the largest ALMA image to date — will allow astronomers to probe the lives of stars in the most extreme region of our galaxy, next to the supermassive black hole at its centre. “It’s a place of…

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How astronomers are unveiling the ‘skeleton’ of the universe

How astronomers are unveiling the ‘skeleton’ of the universe

Paul Sutter writes: The universe is a vast, unseen loom, weaving galaxies into an intricate cosmic web through invisible threads of matter. This cosmic web is the fundamental scaffolding of everything we see, dictating where galaxies form and how they evolve. Much of this architecture remains a mystery, its delicate pathways hidden, and uncovering these cosmic threads requires new eyes and persistent effort. But a new observation has helped us trace one in the Ursa Major Supergroup. In a preprint…

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Astronomers confirm earliest Milky Way-like galaxy in the universe, just 2 billion years after the Big Bang

Astronomers confirm earliest Milky Way-like galaxy in the universe, just 2 billion years after the Big Bang

Live Science reports: Scientists continue to push the boundaries of astronomy and cosmology, thanks to next-generation instruments that can see farther and clearer than ever before. Through these efforts, astronomers have observed some of the earliest galaxies in the Universe. In turn, this has led to refined theories and timelines of galactic formation and evolution. In a recent study, a team of astronomers led by the University of Pittsburgh (UPitt) uncovered what could be the earliest barred spiral galaxy ever…

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The universe may be lopsided – new research

The universe may be lopsided – new research

By Subir Sarkar, University of Oxford The shape of the universe is not something we often think about. But my colleagues and I have published a new study suggests it could be asymmetric or lopsided, meaning not the same in every direction. Should we care about this? Well, today’s “standard cosmological model” – which describes the dynamics and structure of the entire cosmos – rests squarely on the assumption that it is isotropic (looks the same in all directions), and…

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Scientists uncover first evidence of the 4.5-billion-year-old ‘proto Earth’

Scientists uncover first evidence of the 4.5-billion-year-old ‘proto Earth’

Space.com reports: Scientists have identified what may be the first direct evidence of material left over from the “proto-Earth,” a primordial version of our planet that existed before a colossal moon-forming impact reshaped it forever. The study, published Tuesday (Oct. 14) in the journal Nature Geoscience, suggests that tiny chemical clues of this proto-Earth have survived deep within Earth’s rocks, essentially unaltered, for billions of years. The findings provide a rare window into the planet’s original building blocks and could…

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The universe began with the Big Bang and is predicted to end with a Big Crunch

The universe began with the Big Bang and is predicted to end with a Big Crunch

Science Alert reports: If recent discoveries that dark energy is evolving hold any water, our Universe will collapse under its own gravity on a finite timeline, new calculations suggest. Based on several recent dark energy results, a new model finds that the Universe has a lifespan of just 33.3 billion years. Since we are now 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, this suggests that we have a smidge less than 20 billion years left. For another 11 billion years,…

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Life on Earth probably needed supplies from space

Life on Earth probably needed supplies from space

University of Bern: Earth is so far the only known planet on which life exists—with liquid water and a stable atmosphere. However, the conditions were not conducive to life when it formed. The gas-dust cloud from which all the planets in the solar system formed was rich in volatile elements essential for life, such as hydrogen, carbon and sulfur. However, in the inner solar system—the part closest to the sun, where the four rocky planets Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars…

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Building blocks of life may be far more common in space than we thought, study suggests

Building blocks of life may be far more common in space than we thought, study suggests

Live Science reports: Astronomers have discovered key components to life’s building blocks swirling around a remote baby star, hinting that the stuff of life is far more prevalent throughout the universe than once thought. The material, discovered circling the protostar V883 Orionis 1,300 light-years from Earth in the constellation Orion, consists of 17 complex organic molecules that include ethylene glycol and glycolonitrile — precursors to components found in DNA and RNA. The finding, published July 23 in the The Astrophysical…

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How to see the cosmic web here on Earth

How to see the cosmic web here on Earth

Mark Neyrinck writes: The most familiar celestial objects, like Earth, the Moon and the Sun, are spheres. The solar system’s planets have orbits that are roughly circular, and zooming out a hundred-millionfold, the Milky Way is a flattened disk. But zooming out by a further factor of 1,000 from the Milky Way, to encompass our nearest non-satellite galaxy Andromeda, and dozens of others, the shapes look different. The arrangement may look haphazard, but it’s ordered in its own way, in…

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This star offers the earliest glimpse at the birth of a planetary system like ours

This star offers the earliest glimpse at the birth of a planetary system like ours

Science News reports: The birth of a new solar system may have been caught on camera. About 1,400 light-years from Earth sits a young sunlike star surrounded by cooling gas and teensy silicate minerals. These mineral solids — some of the building blocks of rocky planets — are among the first to condense from the gas, suggesting that they’re kick-starting the creation of planets in a system much like the one earthlings call home, researchers report in the July 17…

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Nearly half of the universe’s ordinary matter was uncharted, until now

Nearly half of the universe’s ordinary matter was uncharted, until now

Science News reports: Nearly half of the universe’s ordinary matter has been hiding — until now. Bursts of radio waves have illuminated the whereabouts of all ordinary matter, revealing its distribution between, around and within galaxies, researchers report June 16 in Nature Astronomy. And X-rays have uncovered details about a once hidden string of gas linking four galaxy clusters, another team reports in the June Astronomy and Astrophysics. “The two papers are very complementary,” says astrophysicist Jason Hessels of McGill…

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First images from Vera C. Rubin Observatory show 10 million galaxies

First images from Vera C. Rubin Observatory show 10 million galaxies

  Live Science reports: After decades of preparation, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory released its first images to the world in a live stream on Monday (June 23). The photos, taken by the world’s largest digital camera, are highly-detailed and show relatively large areas of the sky. In a televised news conference, scientists from the observatory revealed new details about the images that far surpass the “sneak peek” images released earlier in the day. In fact, an awe-inspiring spiral galaxy…

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