Space and astronomy news
Image credit: Hubble Physicists from Northeastern University believe that a fundamental force of nature, the bond between electrons and protons, has been strengthening since the Big Bang. In fact, they believe it might have been 200,000 times weaker ten billion years ago – and this could mirror the discovery that the Universe seems to be …
Continue reading “Fundamental Force of Nature Has Changed Over Time?”
Image credit: ESO New data gathered by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) seems to indicate that supernovae might not be symmetrical when they explode – their brightness changes depending on how you look at them. This discovery is important, because astronomers use supernovae as an astronomical yardstick to measure distances to objects. …
Continue reading “Astronomers Measure the Shape of a Supernova”
Image credit: ESO Astronomers from the European Southern Observatory have found a very rare “Einstein ring” gravitational lens, where the light from a distant quasar is warped and magnified by the gravity of a closer galaxy. The two objects are so closely aligned that the image of the quasar forms a ring around the galaxy …
Image credit: Hubble Now that Mars is closer than ever, amateur astronomers with regular backyard telescopes can see incredible details on the planet’s surface. On July 1, astronomers were able to see a dust storm in the Hellas Basin; four days later it was 1,800 kilometres wide, obscuring nearly a quarter of the planet. Two …
Image credit: Subaru Telescope The Subaru telescope, based in Japan, has detected the most distant galaxy ever recorded at 12.8 billion light-years away. The Subaru Deep Field project team uncovered 70 candidate distant objects, by using a special filter which only allows light of a very specific wavelength to pass through – one that corresponds …
I never thought a book about astrobiology could be depressing, but when I put down The Life and Death of Planet Earth by Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee, I couldn’t help but feel kind of glum. Over the course of nearly 300 pages, Ward and Brownlee take a look at our planet and its …
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Image credit: ESO A team of astronomers have spotted an otherwise normal star make a close pass with the supermassive black hole that lurks at the centre of our Milky Way Galaxy. At its closest approach, the star was only 17 light-hours away from the black hole (three times the distance of the Sun to …
Image credit: Hubble The newest image release from the Hubble Space Telescope is of the shredded remnants of Cassiopeia A, a star that went supernova more than 10,000 years ago – the youngest known supernova in our galaxy. Debris has formed into thousands of cooling knots of gas and dust, and will eventually supply new …