Space and astronomy news
Want to visit the most distant galaxy in the early Universe? Now you can via a fantastic visualization created from JWST observations of some of the most distant galaxies ever seen.
Continue reading “Soar Past Thousands of Galaxies in the Early Universe in Thrilling 3D”
As astronomers push our views of the Universe further back in time, their telescopes keep uncovering surprises. That’s the case with a supermassive black hole in CEERS 1019, a distant very early galaxy.
Continue reading “JWST Sees the Most Distant Active Supermassive Black Hole”
Time is relative, as they say, particularly for mid-day meals. As special relativity shows, the measure of any two clocks depends on their motion relative to each other. The greater their relative speed, the slower each clock is relative to each other. So, since we see distant galaxies speeding away from us, we should also see time move more slowly. Right?
Continue reading “The Early Universe Ran in Slow Motion”
On Saturday, July 1st (Canada Day!), the ESA’s Euclid space telescope lifted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. This next-generation astrophysics mission will spend the next few weeks flying to the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange Point, where it will spend the next six years observing one-third of the sky. During that time, Euclid will observe billions of galaxies to a distance of 10 billion light-years, leading to the most extensive 3D map of the Universe ever created. This map will help astronomers and cosmologists resolve the lingering mystery of Dark Matter and Dark Energy (DM & DE).
Continue reading “ESA's Euclid Mission is Off to Explore the Dark Universe”
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has accomplished some amazing things during its first year of operations! In addition to taking the most detailed and breathtaking images ever of iconic celestial objects, Webb completed its first deep field campaign, turned its infrared optics on Mars and Jupiter, obtained spectra directly from an exoplanet’s atmosphere, blocked out the light of a star to reveal the debris disk orbiting it, detected its first exoplanet, and spotted some of the earliest galaxies in the Universe – those that existed at Cosmic Dawn.
Well, buckle up! The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) has just announced what Webb will be studying during its second year of operations – aka. Cycle 2! According to a recent STScI statement, approximately 5,000 hours of prime time and 1,215 hours of parallel time were awarded to General Observer (GO) programs. The programs allotted observation time range from studies of the Solar System and exoplanets to the interstellar and intergalactic medium, from supermassive black holes and quasars to the large-scale structure of the Universe.
Continue reading “James Webb is a GO for Cycle 2 Observations!”
Gravitational waves don’t travel through space and time. They are ripples in the fabric of spacetime itself. This is why they are so difficult to detect. We can only observe them by closely watching how objects bent and stretched within spacetime. But despite their oddness, gravitational waves behave in many of the same ways as light, and astronomers can use that fact to study cosmic expansion.
Continue reading “Gravitational Waves Can Be Gravitationally Lensed, and This Could Provide Another Way to Measure the Expansion of the Universe”
The Cosmic Web is the large-scale structure of the Universe. If you could watch our cosmos unfold from the Big Bang to today, you’d see these filaments (and the voids between them) form throughout time. Now, astronomers using JWST have found ten galaxies that make up a very early version of this structure a mere 830 million years after the Universe began.
Continue reading “JWST Sees the Beginning of the Cosmic Web”
According to Sir Isaac Newton’s theory of Universal Gravitation, gravity is an action at a distance, where one object feels the influence of another regardless of distance. This became a central feature of Classical Newtonian Physics that remained the accepted canon for over two hundred years. By the 20th century, Einstein began reconceptualizing gravity with his theory of General Relativity, where gravity alters the curvature of local spacetime. From this, we get the principle of locality, which states that an object is directly influenced by its surroundings, and distant objects cannot communicate instantaneously.
However, the birth of quantum mechanics has caused yet another conceptualization, as physicists discovered that non-local phenomena not only exist but are fundamental to reality as we know it. This includes quantum entanglement, where the properties of one particle can be transferred to another instantaneously and regardless of distance. In a new study by the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste, Italy, a team of researchers suggests that Dark Matter might interact with gravity in a non-local way.
Continue reading “Dark Matter Might Interact in a Totally Unexpected Way With the Universe”
Since the 1990s, thanks to observations by the venerable Hubble Space Telescope (HST), astronomers have contemplated the mystery of cosmic expansion. While scientists have known about this since the late-1920s and early-30s, images acquired by Hubble‘s Ultra Deep Fields campaign revealed that the expansion has been accelerating for the past six billion years! This led scientists to reconsider Einstein’s theory that there is an unknown force in the Universe that “holds back gravity,” which he named the Cosmological Constant. To astronomers and cosmologists today, this force is known as “Dark Energy.”
However, not everyone is sold on the idea of Dark Energy, and some believe that cosmic expansion could mean there is a flaw in our understanding of gravity. In the near future, scientists will benefit from next-generation space telescopes to provide fresh insight into this mysterious force. These include the ESA’s Euclid mission, scheduled for launch this July, and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (RST), the direct successor to Hubble that will launch in May 2027. Once operational, these space telescopes will investigate these competing theories to see which holds up.
Continue reading “Two New Space Telescopes Will Bring Dark Energy Into Focus”
Despite the enormous densities, the early universe didn’t collapse into a black hole because, simply put, there was nothing to collapse into.
Continue reading “Why Didn’t the Big Bang Collapse in a Giant Black Hole?”