Brian Koberlein
Did the Last Great Galactic Merger Create the Milky Way's Bar?
About 8-11 billion years ago, a dwarf galaxy merged with the Milky Way, adding 50 billion solar masses of stars,…
Dark Matter Could Help Solve the Final Parsec Problem of Black Holes
One outstanding mystery in astrophysics is known as the "final parsec problem." Simulations predict that binary black holes should stall…
CERN Has Joined the Search for Dark Photons
Now that the Large Hadron Collider has measured the mass of the Higgs boson, physicists are trying to understand how…
The Universe Can't Hide Behind the Zone of Avoidance Any Longer
The Solar System sits within the galactic plane, so it was once impossible to look past the core of the…
The Oort Cloud Might be More Active Than We Thought
Astronomers have seen meteors strike the Earth on hyperbolic trajectories for decades; they would have escaped the Solar System if…
If You Account for the Laniakea Supercluster, The Hubble Tension Might Be Even Larger
When you measure the Universe's expansion rate to relatively nearby galaxies against the expansion rate in the cosmic microwave background…
If We Could Find Them, Primordial Black Holes Would Explain a Lot About the Universe
As far as we know, black holes can only be formed by the death of massive stars, but a persistent…
A Dwarf Galaxy That's Almost All Dark Matter
Thanks to new techniques, astronomers are mapping the Universe with more precision, finding galaxies with more and less dark matter.…
Satellites Make up to 80,000 Flashing Glints Per Hour. It's a Big Problem for Astronomers
Telescopes searching for brief flashes like supernovae and asteroids have to contend with a rising number of glints from satellites.…
Want to Find Life? Compare a Planet to its Neighbors
Astrobiologists have difficulty finding a single chemical that proves conclusive life on an exoplanet. A new paper suggests that studying…