News (Page 795)

Almost all galaxy clusters experience mergers. While a merger takes place, a specific spiral pattern can often be observed in X-ray images. Such a spiral feature is due to the motion of the sloshing gas induced by a merger. Observing a phenomenon similar to sloshing gas in the daily life is easy: When you swirl a wine glass containing liquid, you will see how the water rotates along with the glass. Discovering how fast the sloshing gas moves in galaxy clusters has profound astronomical meaning and therefore is of great interest to astronomers. A group of researchers from Taiwan and Japan has now measured itRead More →

The word “HAZMAT” describes substances that pose a risk to the environment, or even to life itself. Imagine the term being applied to entire planets, where violent flares from the host star may make worlds uninhabitable by affecting their atmospheres. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

New observations by two Arizona State University astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have caught a red dwarf star in a violent outburst, or superflare. The blast of radiation was more powerful than any such outburst ever detected from the Sun, and would likely affect the habiltability of any planets orbitiing it. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

A two-year cycle in the gamma-ray brightness of a blazar, a galaxy powered by a supermassive black hole, has been confirmed by 10 years of observations from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The findings were announced today at the Eighth International Fermi Symposium meeting this week in Baltimore. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

How do you create the largest 3-D map of the universe? It’s as easy as teaching 5,000 robots how to “dance.” DESI, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, is an experiment that will target millions of distant galaxies by automatically swiveling fiber-optic positioners (the robots) to point at them and gather their light. In creating this detailed map, scientists hope to learn more about dark energy, which is driving the accelerating expansion of the universe. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

Long ago, sky watchers linked the brightest stars into patterns reflecting animals, heroes, monsters and even scientific instruments into what is now an official collection of 88 constellations. Now scientists with NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have devised a set of modern constellations constructed from sources in the gamma-ray sky to celebrate the mission’s 10th year of operations. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

An international team of astronomers has discovered a titanic structure in the early Universe, just two billion years after the Big Bang. This galaxy proto-supercluster, nicknamed Hyperion, is the largest and most massive structure yet found at such a remote time and distance. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

New research by a team led by an astrophysicist at the University of Warwick has a way of finally telling whether newly forming planets are migrating within the disc of dust and gas that typically surrounds stars or whether they are simply staying put in the same orbit around the star. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

The Moon may be the key to unlocking how the first stars and galaxies shaped the early universe. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

An international team of researchers has investigated a peculiar extragalactic radio source known as IC 1531. The new study analyzes the nature of IC 1531’s high-energy emission, suggesting that the source is a radio galaxy. The findings are presented in a paper published October 5 on arXiv.org. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

An international team of scientists, including KAUST high performance computing experts and astronomers from the Paris Observatory and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), in collaboration with NVIDIA, is taking the search for habitable planets and observation of first epoch galaxies to the next level. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

Collimated jets provide astronomers with some of the most powerful evidence that a supermassive black hole lurks in the heart of most galaxies. Some of these black holes appear to be active, gobbling up material from their surroundings and launching jets at ultra-high speeds, while others are quiescent, even dormant. Why are some black holes feasting and others starving? Recent observations from the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA, are shedding light on this question. Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →

The Big Bang has captured our imagination like no other theory in science: the magnificent, explosive birth of our Universe. But do you know what came next? Powered by WPeMaticoRead More →