Space and astronomy news
When stars grow old and die, their mass determines their ultimate fate. Many supermassive stars have futures as neutron stars. But, the question is, how massive can their neutron stars get? That’s one that Professor Fan Yizhong and his team at Purple Mountain Observatory in China set out to answer.
Gamma-ray telescopes observing neutron star collisions might be the key to identifying the composition of dark matter. One leading theory explaining dark matter it that is mostly made from hypothetical particles called axions. If an axion is created within the intensely energetic environment of two neutron stars merging, it should then decay into gamma-ray photons …
Continue reading “Colliding Neutron Stars are the Ultimate Particle Accelerators”
The multiverse may be a cool (and convenient) concept for comic books and superhero movies, but why do scientists take it seriously? In a new book titled “The Allure of the Multiverse,” physicist Paul Halpern traces why many theorists have come to believe that longstanding scientific puzzles can be solved only if they allow for …
Continue reading “Why Serious Scientists Are Mesmerized by the Multiverse”
The early universe, according to the Standard Model of Cosmology, ought to be a fairly homogenous place, with little structure or arrangement. In 2021, however, astronomers discovered a large pattern of galaxies forming a giant arc 3.3 billion light years across. Now, a second large-scale pattern has emerged. This time, it’s an enormous circle of …
Continue reading “Two Giant Structures Have Been Found Billions of Light-Years Away”
Supernova explosions are fascinating because they’re so cataclysmic, powerful, and awe-inspiring. They’re Nature’s summer blockbusters. Humans have recorded their existence in ancient astronomical records and stone carvings, and in our age, with telescopes. Now, the Dark Energy Survey (DES) has uncovered the largest number of Type 1A supernovae ever found with a single telescope.
Spiral galaxies like the Milky Way are like cosmic snowflakes—no two are exactly alike. For many years, astronomers thought spirals couldn’t exist until the universe was about half its present age. Now, a newly discovered galaxy in the early Universe is challenging that idea.
In the very early universe, physics was weird. A process known as “inflation,” where best we understand the universe went from a single infinitesimal point to everything we see today, was one such instance of that weird physics. Now, scientists from the Chinese Academy of Science have sifted through 15 years of pulsar timing data …
Continue reading “The Echoes From Inflation Could Still Be Shaking the Cosmos Today”
As far as we know, black holes can only be formed by the death of massive stars, but a persistent theory says that black holes of all masses could have formed directly in the early Universe. These primordial black holes would help explain several mysteries in astronomy: outlier mergers of black holes, dark matter, and young supermassive black holes. How are they different from stellar mass black holes, and what upcoming instruments could detect them?
Astronomers don’t know if the Universe is finite or infinite. Whatever the case, it’s larger than the Observable Universe, which measures 93 billion light-years across. A new paper proposes that the actual Universe is comparatively tiny, not much bigger than its observed size – just a few orders of magnitude larger. A smaller Universe solves some problems with other theories of cosmology, including inflation and the amount of dark energy in the Universe.
A team of astronomers have developed a new technique that relies on Baryon Acoustic Oscillations to measure cosmic distances.