“Big Bang” – Science World

Artist rendering of the exoplanet WASP-107b transiting its highly active K-type main sequence star. (ESA/Hubble, NASA, M. Kornmesser)

First Detection of Helium in an Exoplanet Atmosphere

May 4, 2018

Scientists say for the first several hundred thousand years or so after the Big Bang, there were virtually only two elements in the universe, hydrogen, and helium. A hydrogen atom is made of only one proton and one electron, and a helium atom has two each of protons, electrons, and neutrons. Hydrogen and then helium are […]

Artist impression of the 14 galaxies hdetected by ALMA as they appear in the very early, very distant universe. These galaxies are in the process of merging and will eventually form the core of a massive galaxy cluster. (NRAO/AUI/NSF; S. Dagnello)

Galaxy Megamergers 1.4 – 1.5 Billion Years after the Big Bang

April 26, 2018

Two teams of astronomers have used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX), in Chile, to observe dense concentrations of so-called “starburst” galaxies. With these galaxies packing together so closely, the scientific teams realized that they were getting ready to violently collide and merge with each other, which would eventually […]

This is how the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, looked on 8/27/13, from New Zealand in the Southern Hemisphere. (Dave Young/Creative Commons, Attribution 2.0 Generic via Flickr)

Astronomers Search for the Sun’s Long-Lost Solar Siblings

April 20, 2018

While a family reunion is highly unlikely, Australian and European astronomers are still trying to find our Sun’s long-lost solar siblings which are now scattered throughout the sky. To do so, the scientists examined the of some 350,000 stars in the Milky Way – as though they were mapping each star’s DNA. The sun was […]

Galaxy cluster MACS J1149.5+223. Highlighted is the position where the star LS1 appeared — its image magnified by a factor 2000 by gravitational microlensing.(NASA, ESA, S. Rodney (John Hopkins University, USA) and the FrontierSN team; T. Treu (University of California Los Angeles, USA), P. Kelly (University of California Berkeley, USA) and the GLASS team; J. Lotz (STScI) and the Frontier Fields team; M. Postman (STScI) and the CLASH team; and Z. Levay (STScI))

Discovered: Most Distant Star Seen (So Far)

April 4, 2018

The 2016 discovery of the most distant star ever seen – so far – has been outlined in a new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy. According to the study, the star, formally named 1) but nicknamed Icarus, is located about 9 billion light-years from Earth. This means light from the star started toward […]

A timeline of the universe, updated to show when the first stars emerged. This updated timeline of the universe reflects the recent discovery that the first stars emerged by 180 million years after the Big Bang. The research behind this timeline was conducted by Judd Bowman of Arizona State University and his colleagues, with funding from the National Science Foundation. (N.R.Fuller, National Science Foundation)

First Stars Formed in Universe 180 Million Years After Big Bang

March 2, 2018

A group of researchers led by Judd Bowman, an astronomer at Arizona State University, recently made a remarkable discovery by spotting the impressions of the earliest stars in the universe. Soon after the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago, the universe expanded, cooled and became very dark. Stars and other cosmological objects hadn’t formed yet. […]

Artist rendition of Voyager in space (Image: NASA/JPL)

Voyager 1; Humans Peak; Distant Black Hole

December 8, 2017

JPL Fires Up Voyager 1 Thrusters after 37 Year Rest Imagine you’ve discovered a rare gem of a car that’s been tucked away in a barn for the last 37 years. The barn’s owner says it’s yours if you can drive it away. But if you’ve ever tried to start a motor vehicle and keep it […]

A slice through largest-ever three-dimensional map of the Universe. Earth is at the left, and distances to galaxies and quasars are labelled by the lookback time to the objects (lookback time means how long the light from an object has been traveling to reach us here on Earth). The locations of quasars (galaxies with supermassive black holes) are shown by the red dots, and nearer galaxies mapped by SDSS are also shown (yellow). The right-hand edge of the map is the limit of the observable Universe, from which we see the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) – the light “left over” from the Big Bang. The bulk of the empty space in between the quasars and the edge of the observable universe are from the “dark ages”, prior to the formation of most stars, galaxies, or quasars. (Anand Raichoor, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland and the SDSS collaboration)

Astronomers Create Largest 3D Map of the Universe

May 24, 2017

A team of astronomers working with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) created the largest ever three-dimensional map of the universe. Released along with an accompanying study, the astronomers say the new map is the first to exclusively use the positions of quasars to chart the significant structures of the Universe. “Because quasars are so […]

Researchers Doubt the Existence of Dark Energy

April 10, 2017

According to NASA, the universe is composed of three things. About 4.6% of it is normal (visible) matter, 24% is dark matter and the remaining 71.4% is made up of dark energy. In other words, hypothetically speaking, around 95% of everything in the universe can’t even be seen. Now a Hungarian and American team of […]

Simulated image of the HD 106906 stellar debris disk, showing a ring of rocky planet-forming material. (Erika Nesvold/Carnegie Institution for Science)

Insight Into Planetary Evolution – Dark Matter Rare in Old Galaxies

March 17, 2017

Scientists Gain New Insight into Planetary Evolution Scientists recently gained new insight into the evolution of planet formation by creating and studying a model of a fairly young solar system 300 light years from Earth. The nearly 13 million year-old planetary system circles a star known as HD 106906. The system features a surrounding planet […]

Jupiter’s Auroras; Distant Universe in Detail; Severe Fire Season For Amazon

July 1, 2016

NASA’s Hubble and Juno Probe Study Jupiter’s Auroras As NASA’s probe Juno buzzes closer and closer for its 4th of July rendezvous with Jupiter, astronomers are using the good ole Hubble Space Telescope to study the planet’s auroras, which are just like our own northern and southern lights. These spectacular light shows in the Jovian […]

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