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Category: Astronomy/cosmology

The giant arcs that may dwarf everything in the cosmos

The giant arcs that may dwarf everything in the cosmos

Jasmin Fox-Skelly writes: In 2021, British PhD student Alexia Lopez was analysing the light coming from distant quasars when she made a startling discovery. She detected a giant, almost symmetrical arc of galaxies 9.3 billion light years away in the constellation of Boötes the Herdsman. Spanning a massive 3.3 billion light years across, the structure is a whopping 1/15th the radius of the observable Universe. If we could see it from Earth, it would be the size of 35 full…

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Neutron stars: A form of matter like no other

Neutron stars: A form of matter like no other

Katia Moskvitch writes: On Aug. 6, 1967, Jocelyn Bell was looking at the squiggles drawn by a red pen on moving rolls of chart paper—the data from a radio telescope she was using to do her Ph.D. research on distant galaxies. She noticed one squiggle that looked odd. It was a “a bit of scruff,” she tells me from her office at Oxford University, where she’s now a visiting professor of astrophysics. The “scruff” was a series of sharp pulses…

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James Webb telescope spotted the earliest known ‘quenched’ galaxy

James Webb telescope spotted the earliest known ‘quenched’ galaxy

Science News reports: The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted the earliest known galaxy to abruptly stop forming stars. The galaxy, called GS-9209, quenched its star formation more than 12.5 billion years ago, researchers report January 26 at arXiv.org. That’s only a little more than a billion years after the Big Bang. Its existence reveals new details about how galaxies live and die across cosmic time. “It’s a remarkable discovery,” says astronomer Mauro Giavalisco of the University of Massachusetts Amherst,…

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The largest structures in the Universe are still glowing with the shock of their creation

The largest structures in the Universe are still glowing with the shock of their creation

Tessa Vernstrom using Planck data, Author provided By Tessa Vernstrom, The University of Western Australia and Christopher Riseley, Università di Bologna On the largest scales, the Universe is ordered into a web-like pattern: galaxies are pulled together into clusters, which are connected by filaments and separated by voids. These clusters and filaments contain dark matter, as well as regular matter like gas and galaxies. We call this the “cosmic web”, and we can see it by mapping the locations and…

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Astronomers say they have spotted the universe’s first stars

Astronomers say they have spotted the universe’s first stars

Jonathan O’Callaghan writes: A group of astronomers poring over data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has glimpsed light from ionized helium in a distant galaxy, which could indicate the presence of the universe’s very first generation of stars. These long-sought, inaptly named “Population III” stars would have been ginormous balls of hydrogen and helium sculpted from the universe’s primordial gas. Theorists started imagining these first fireballs in the 1970s, hypothesizing that, after short lifetimes, they exploded as supernovas,…

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Standard model of cosmology survives a telescope’s surprising finds

Standard model of cosmology survives a telescope’s surprising finds

Rebecca Boyle writes: The cracks in cosmology were supposed to take a while to appear. But when the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) opened its lens last spring, extremely distant yet very bright galaxies immediately shone into the telescope’s field of view. “They were just so stupidly bright, and they just stood out,” said Rohan Naidu, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The galaxies’ apparent distances from Earth suggested that they formed much earlier in the history of…

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New data show that light pollution is rapidly obscuring the night sky

New data show that light pollution is rapidly obscuring the night sky

Science News reports: The night sky has been brightening faster than researchers realized, thanks to the use of artificial lights at night. A study of more than 50,000 observations of stars by citizen scientists reveals that the night sky grew about 10 percent brighter, on average, every year from 2011 to 2022. In other words, a baby born in a region where roughly 250 stars were visible every night would see only 100 stars on their 18th birthday, researchers report…

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Ancient humans and their early depictions of the universe

Ancient humans and their early depictions of the universe

Astronomy reports: In the Lascaux caves of southwestern France, which are famously adorned with 17,000-year-old paintings, the artist’s subject is almost always a large animal. But hovering above the image of one bull is an unexpected addition: a cluster of small black dots that some scholars interpret as stars. Perhaps it is the eye-catching Pleiades, which Paleolithic hunter-gatherers would have seen vividly in the unpolluted sky. Claims of prehistoric astronomy are controversial. Even if true, we frequently trace our cosmic…

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Inside ancient asteroids, gamma rays made building blocks of life

Inside ancient asteroids, gamma rays made building blocks of life

John Rennie and Allison Parshall write: In 2021, the Hayabusa2 space mission successfully delivered a morsel of the asteroid 162173 Ryugu to Earth — five grams of the oldest, most pristine matter left over from the solar system’s formation 4.5 billion years ago. Last spring, scientists revealed that the chemical composition of the asteroid includes 10 amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. The discovery added to the evidence that the primordial soup from which life on Earth arose may…

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The remarkable emptiness of existence

The remarkable emptiness of existence

Paul M Sutter writes: In 1654 a German scientist and politician named Otto von Guericke was supposed to be busy being the mayor of Magdeburg. But instead he was putting on a demonstration for lords of the Holy Roman Empire. With his newfangled invention, a vacuum pump, he sucked the air out of a copper sphere constructed of two hemispheres. He then had two teams of horses, 15 in each, attempt to pull the hemispheres apart. To the astonishment of…

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The Webb Telescope is just getting started

The Webb Telescope is just getting started

The New York Times reports: So far it’s been eye candy from heaven: The black vastness of space teeming with enigmatic, unfathomably distant blobs of light. Ghostly portraits of Neptune, Jupiter and other neighbors we thought we knew already. Nebulas and galaxies made visible by the penetrating infrared eyes of the James Webb Space Telescope. The telescope, named for James Webb, the NASA administrator during the buildup to the Apollo moon landings, is a joint project of NASA, the European…

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Asymmetry detected in the distribution of galaxies

Asymmetry detected in the distribution of galaxies

Katie McCormick writes: Physicists believe they have detected a striking asymmetry in the arrangements of galaxies in the sky. If confirmed, the finding would point to features of the unknown fundamental laws that operated during the Big Bang. “If this result is real, someone’s going to get a Nobel Prize,” said Marc Kamionkowski, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the analysis. As if playing a cosmic game of Connect the Dots, the researchers drew lines between…

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Why this universe is more likely than any other

Why this universe is more likely than any other

Charlie Wood writes: Cosmologists have spent decades striving to understand why our universe is so stunningly vanilla. Not only is it smooth and flat as far as we can see, but it’s also expanding at an ever-so-slowly increasing pace, when naïve calculations suggest that — coming out of the Big Bang — space should have become crumpled up by gravity and blasted apart by repulsive dark energy. To explain the cosmos’s flatness, physicists have added a dramatic opening chapter to…

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Should we really be messing with asteroid orbits?

Should we really be messing with asteroid orbits?

Caleb Scharf writes: Things go bump in the cosmic night all the time. Rocky objects collide in planetary systems across our galaxy, providing astute astronomers with telltale signatures of warmly glowing dust from these grinding impacts. Stellar remnants like neutron stars can crash together unleashing bursts of searing gamma-rays, and even black holes can collide and coalesce in events marked by the gargantuan ringing of spacetime as energy ripples outward in gravitational waves. On Sept. 26, 2022, another particularly novel…

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NASA to crash $330m spacecraft into asteroid to see if impact can alter course

NASA to crash $330m spacecraft into asteroid to see if impact can alter course

The Guardian reports: In a few weeks, Nasa controllers will deliberately crash their $330m Dart robot spacecraft into an asteroid. The half-tonne probe will be travelling at more than four miles a second when it strikes its target, Dimorphos, and will be destroyed. The aim of this kamikaze science mission is straightforward: space engineers want to learn how to deflect asteroids in case one is ever discovered on a collision course with Earth. Observations of Dart’s impact on Dimorphos’s orbit…

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Jupiter glows in pictures from Webb telescope

Jupiter glows in pictures from Webb telescope

Live Science reports: Jupiter glows with polar lights and shimmering clouds in new imagery from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). NASA released the sharp new pictures Monday (Aug. 22). The images are composites from several different wavelengths of light. In some of the new images, two of the planet’s moons, Amalthea and Adrastea, sparkle in the gas giant’s orbit, and Jupiter’s faint rings glow like a halo. At the planet’s North and South poles, the northern and southern lights…

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