A multitude of discoveries are on the horizon after a much-awaited release that is based on 22 months of charting the sky as part of Gaia’s mission to produce the largest, most precise three-dimensional map of our Galaxy ever created. The new data includes positions, distance indicators, and motions of more than 1 billion stars, along with ...
While astronomers routinely study galaxies much farther away, they’re visible only because they glow with the brightness of billions of stars. And a supernova, often brighter than the galaxy in which it sits, also can be visible across the entire universe. Beyond a distance of about 100 million light-years, however, a star in these galaxies ...
A Columbia University-led team of astrophysicists has discovered a dozen black holes gathered around Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. The finding, which has been published in Nature, is the first to support a decades-old prediction, opening up myriad opportunities to better understand the universe. Astrophysicist Chuck Hailey, ...
New images from ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile and other telescopes reveal a rich landscape of stars and glowing clouds of gas in one of our closest neighboring galaxies, the Small Magellanic Cloud, including a dead star circled by light. The pictures have allowed astronomers to identify an elusive dead star buried among filaments ...
Astronomers, using data from the Gemini and W. M. Keck Observatories in Hawai’i, have encountered a galaxy that appears to have almost no dark matter. Since the Universe is dominated by dark matter and it is the foundation upon which galaxies are built, “…this is a game changer,” according to Principal Investigator Pieter van Dokkum ...
Astronomers are back in the dark about what dark matter might be, after new observations showed the mysterious substance may not be interacting with forces other than gravity after all. Dr. Andrew Robertson of Durham University presented the new results to the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science in Liverpool. Three years ago, a ...
It might sound like something from a science fiction plot — astronauts traveling into deep space being bombarded by cosmic rays — but space radiation exposure is science fact. As future missions look to travel back to the moon or even to Mars, new research from the University of New Hampshire’s Space Science Center cautions ...
Astronomers have discovered that all galaxies rotate once every billion years, no matter how big they are. The Earth spinning around on its axis once gives us the length of a day, and a complete orbit of the Earth around the Sun gives us a year. “It’s not Swiss watch precision,” said Professor Gerhardt Meurer ...
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists are part of a national planetary defense team that designed a conceptual spacecraft to deflect asteroids that are Earth-bound, and evaluated whether it would be able to nudge a massive asteroid — which has a remote chance of hitting Earth in 2135 — off course. The design and case ...
Trailing Earth’s orbit at 94 million miles away, the Kepler space telescope has survived many potential knock-outs during its nine years in flight, from mechanical failures to being blasted by cosmic rays. At this rate, the hardy spacecraft may reach its finish line in a manner we will consider a wonderful success. With nary a ...
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