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Category: Astronomy/cosmology

Dark energy may come from giant cosmic voids

Dark energy may come from giant cosmic voids

Paul Sutter writes: Gigantic deserts of almost complete nothingness that make up most of the universe may be causing the expansion of the universe to speed up, new research suggests. That means these vast tracts of nothingness could explain dark energy, the mysterious force that seems to be flinging the universe apart. Zoom all the way out from the solar system and the Milky Way galaxy, and an interesting pattern emerges: the cosmic web, the largest pattern found in nature….

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Webb telescope reveals unpredicted bounty of bright galaxies in early universe

Webb telescope reveals unpredicted bounty of bright galaxies in early universe

Science reports: The James Webb Space Telescope has only been watching the sky for a few weeks, and it has already delivered a startling finding: tens, hundreds, maybe even 1000 times more bright galaxies in the early universe than astronomers anticipated. “No one was expecting anything like this,” says Michael Boylan-Kolchin of the University of Texas, Austin. “Galaxies are exploding out of the woodwork,” says Rachel Somerville of the Flatiron Institute. Galaxy formation models may now need a revision, as…

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Four revelations from the Webb telescope about distant galaxies

Four revelations from the Webb telescope about distant galaxies

Nature reports: NASA built its state-of-the-art James Webb Space Telescope to peer into the distant Universe and back towards the dawn of time — and it’s already doing so spectacularly. In the two weeks since Webb’s first science images and data became available for astronomers to work with, they have reported a flood of preliminary discoveries, including multiple contenders for what could be the most distant galaxy ever seen. Webb’s images reveal a wealth of galaxies glimmering in the distant…

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New theories are taking shape about how planets are made

New theories are taking shape about how planets are made

Rebecca Boyle writes: Start at the center, with the sun. Our middle-aged star may be more placid than most, but it is otherwise unremarkable. Its planets, however, are another story. First, Mercury: More charred innards than fully fledged planet, it probably lost its outer layers in a traumatic collision long ago. Next come Venus and Earth, twins in some respects, though oddly only one is fertile. Then there’s Mars, another wee world, one that, unlike Mercury, never lost layers; it…

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Looking directly towards the edge of time

Looking directly towards the edge of time

Dr Katie Mack writes: “From a tropical rainforest to the edge of time itself, James Webb begins a voyage back to the birth of the Universe” – so went the launch narration when astronomy’s latest superpowered space explorer, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), lifted off from French Guiana on Christmas Day. Like most launch announcements, it employed a bit of poetic license to add to the drama. But now that JWST is settled into its orbit and sending back…

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Jupiter’s moon Europa may have water where life could exist, scientists suggest

Jupiter’s moon Europa may have water where life could exist, scientists suggest

The Guardian reports: Subterranean pools of salty water may be commonplace on Jupiter’s moon, Europa, according to researchers who believe the sites could be promising spots to search for signs of life beyond Earth. Evidence for the shallow pools, not far beneath the frozen surface of the Jovian moon, emerged when scientists noticed that giant parallel ridges stretching for hundreds of miles on Europa were strikingly similar to surface features discovered on the Greenland ice sheet. If the extensive ice…

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First known interstellar object on Earth, scientists say

First known interstellar object on Earth, scientists say

Motherboard reports: An object from another star system crashed into Earth in 2014, the United States Space Command (USSC) confirmed in a newly-released memo. The meteor ignited in a fireball in the skies near Papua New Guinea, the memo states, and scientists believe it possibly sprinkled interstellar debris into the South Pacific Ocean. The confirmation backs up the breakthrough discovery of the first interstellar meteor—and, retroactively, the first known interstellar object of any kind to reach our solar system—which was…

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A bright star in the right place at the right time, provides a glimpse of the cosmic dawn

A bright star in the right place at the right time, provides a glimpse of the cosmic dawn

Science Alert reports: From billions of light-years across the vast gulf of space-time, from the very dawn of the Universe, astronomers have detected the light of a single star. Its discoverers have nicknamed it Earendel, from the Anglo-Saxon word meaning “morning star”; to date, it is the most distant object of its kind ever detected, dating to just 900 million years after the Big Bang. Because Earendel’s light has traveled so far to reach us, its properties are difficult to…

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An ancient solar calendar built by an unknown civilization

An ancient solar calendar built by an unknown civilization

Carly Cassella writes: Long before the Incas rose to power in Peru and began to celebrate their sun god, a little known civilization was building the earliest known astronomical observatory in the Americas. While not quite as old as sites like Stonehenge, these ancient ruins, known as Chankillo, are considered a “masterpiece of human creative genius“, holding unique features not seen anywhere else in the world. Based in the coastal desert of Peru, the archaeological site famously contains a row…

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Massive black holes shown to act like quantum particles

Massive black holes shown to act like quantum particles

Charlie Wood writes: When two black holes collide, the titanic crash ripples out through the very fabric of the cosmos. Physicists have used Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity to predict the rough contours of these gravitational waves as they pass through Earth, and wave after wave has been confirmed by the LIGO and Virgo gravitational-wave detectors. But physicists are starting to flounder as they attempt to use Einstein’s thorny equations to extract ultra-precise shapes of all possible reverberations. These currently…

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What we can learn about the universe from just one galaxy

What we can learn about the universe from just one galaxy

Rivka Galchen writes: Imagine if you could look at a snowflake at the South Pole and determine the size and the climate of all of Antarctica. Or study a randomly selected tree in the Amazon rain forest and, from that one tree—be it rare or common, narrow or wide, young or old—deduce characteristics of the forest as a whole. Or, what if, by looking at one galaxy among the hundred billion or so in the observable universe, one could say…

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A large solar storm could knock out the power grid and the internet – an electrical engineer explains how

A large solar storm could knock out the power grid and the internet – an electrical engineer explains how

Typical amounts of solar particles hitting the earth’s magnetosphere can be beautiful, but too much could be catastrophic. Svein-Magne Tunli – tunliweb.no/Wikimedia, CC BY-NC-SA By David Wallace, Mississippi State University On Sept. 1 and 2, 1859, telegraph systems around the world failed catastrophically. The operators of the telegraphs reported receiving electrical shocks, telegraph paper catching fire, and being able to operate equipment with batteries disconnected. During the evenings, the aurora borealis, more commonly known as the northern lights, could be…

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Peptides on stardust may have provided a shortcut to life

Peptides on stardust may have provided a shortcut to life

Yasemin Saplakoglu writes: Billions of years ago, some unknown location on the sterile, primordial Earth became a cauldron of complex organic molecules from which the first cells emerged. Origin-of-life researchers have proposed countless imaginative ideas about how that occurred and where the necessary raw ingredients came from. Some of the most difficult to account for are proteins, the critical backbones of cellular chemistry, because in nature today they are made exclusively by living cells. How did the first protein form…

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The Webb Space Telescope mission is working better than anyone could have predicted

The Webb Space Telescope mission is working better than anyone could have predicted

Marina Koren writes: The Webb telescope, named after a former NASA administrator, left Earth in a thundering launch from a rain-forest-ringed spaceport. The mood in town in the days before launch was cheery optimism, with an undercurrent of low-grade panic. When I asked the engineers and scientists there about the launch, they would make a bit of a nervous face before returning to a confident expression. The launch wasn’t the scary bit; Webb was riding on one of the most…

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One shot to see the universe like never before

One shot to see the universe like never before

Marina Koren writes: In the beginning, the universe was dark. The Big Bang had electrified the cosmos into existence, and the new landscape buzzed with particles, chaotic and hot, before cooling off into a calm expanse of hydrogen and helium. Then something began to happen in the fog. Gravity drove pockets of gas to collapse in on themselves and ignite, creating the first stars. The radiant orbs began to cluster, forming the first galaxies: messy, misshapen things, not as polished…

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Hubble takes amazing photos of the Prawn Nebula and a newborn star

Hubble takes amazing photos of the Prawn Nebula and a newborn star

Hubble takes amazing photos of the Prawn Nebula and a newborn star https://t.co/Ygw7VQ4skG — New Scientist (@newscientist) December 12, 2021 New Scientist reports: The above image shows the Prawn Nebula, a huge cloud of dust and gas often referred to as a stellar nursery because it acts as the birthplace for new stars. It is about 6000 light years from Earth and located in the Scorpius constellation, which is among the most prominent of the 88 constellations. The Prawn Nebula…

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