Glitch Jeopardizes Planet Hunter’s Mission
A malfunction could force an abrupt end to the Kepler Space Telescope’s planet-hunting mission. NASA received the unwelcome news last Sunday after discovering Kepler had malfunctioned and is currently operating in a self-protective “safe-mode” as it also did earlier this month. The US space agency made the news public this past Wednesday. It appears at […]
Science Images of the Week
Does ‘God Particle’ Spell End of the Universe?
Last summer, when scientists finally cornered the elusive building block of the universe known as the Higgs boson, they apparently also discovered something else: that the universe’s days might be numbered. “It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable,” said Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist from the U.S. Department of Energy’s […]
Scientists Discover Universe’s Largest Known Structure
Scientists have found the largest known structure in the universe, a cluster of galactic cores so vast it would take four billion years for a spacecraft traveling at the speed of light to cross it. The sighting challenges a theory from Einstein which suggests such a massive object shouldn’t exist in the universe. A quasar […]
Telescope Survey Reveals Universe’s Dark Secrets
Scientists have released the final version of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey (CFHTLS), data gathered over six years which probes deep recesses of the Universe, including galaxies as far as nine billion light-years away. This treasure trove of information will allow scientists to better study dark matter; energy; new, developing and evolving galaxies; and any […]
Science Images of the Week
Science Images of the Week
Hubble Looks Into the Depths of Space and Time
The Hubble Space Telescope has given us the deepest view of space ever. Called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, it’s a composite of more than 2,000 photos taken by Hubble over 10 years. “The XDF is the deepest image of the sky ever obtained and reveals the faintest and most distant galaxies ever seen. […]
Scientists Recreate the Big Bang
Since they can’t turn back time to witness the creation of the universe almost 14 billion years ago, scientists are working on the next best thing: creating a virtual universe, starting at the beginning with the Big Bang. With the help of the world’s third–fastest computer, physicists from the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National […]