The Early Universe Ran in Slow Motion

By Brian Koberlein - July 05, 2023 01:42 PM UTC | Cosmology
One of Einstein's predictions is that we should see time moving at different rates at different ages of the Universe. Researchers have confirmed this prediction out to half the age of the Universe using Type 1a supernovae as standard candles. Astronomers have gone much further back in time, observing quasars that sent out their light 12 billion years ago. Over this vast distance, time has slowed to a crawl, with every second experienced by those quasars taking five seconds from our perspective.
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Gravitational Waves Can Be Gravitationally Lensed, and This Could Provide Another Way to Measure the Expansion of the Universe

By Brian Koberlein - July 04, 2023 10:16 AM UTC | Cosmology
Astronomers can never have enough ways to measure the expansion in the Universe, from nearby stars to distant quasars. A new study suggests another method might come from the growing catalog of gravitational waves detected by LIGO and other observatories. As two black holes merge in a distant galaxy, the gravitational waves could pass close to a massive cluster that would create a gravitational lens. Some of the waves would take different paths around the gravitational lens, allowing astronomers to measure the expansion rate of the Universe. Gravitationally lensed gravitational waves.
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A Planet Was Swallowed by a Red Giant, But it Survived

By Brian Koberlein - July 02, 2023 11:00 AM UTC | Exoplanets
When our Sun runs out of hydrogen fuel in its core, it'll switch to burning helium and bloat up as a red giant. This will make it 100 times larger, gobbling up the inner planets and maybe even Earth. Maybe there's hope. Astronomers have found a planet orbiting a dying star that must have been swallowed up during that expansion phase. The star would have been 1.5 times bigger during the red giant phase than the planet's orbit. Being inside a red giant star doesn't lead to the inevitable death of a planet.
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Astronomers Find the Fastest Spider Pulsar, Filling in the Missing Link in Their Evolution

By Brian Koberlein - July 01, 2023 12:05 PM UTC | Stars
Pulsars are rapidly spinning neutron stars which release blasts of radio waves with atomic clocklike accuracy. The fastest can be turning hundreds of times a second. But another class of pulsars turns agonizingly slowly in comparison, completing a rotation in hours. Astronomers have termed these "spider pulsars" because they have to feast on a binary companion star to slow down like this. Now researchers have discovered the fastest-turning spider pulsar, completing a rotation every 53 minutes, which fills in a gap in their observations.
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Nancy Grace Roman and Vera Rubin Will be the Perfect Astronomical Partnership

By Brian Koberlein - June 29, 2023 02:29 PM UTC | Telescopes
The Vera Rubin Observatory and the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope are two powerful astronomical instruments due to come online in the next couple of years. While Rubin is a ground-based telescope, scanning the southern hemisphere every few nights, Roman is a space telescope with a wide-field view of the cosmos. They're two different instruments but will work as powerful partners, studying gravitational microlensing events, using variable stars to measure distances in the cosmos, and much more.
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What Would the Milky Way Look Like From Afar?

By Brian Koberlein - June 28, 2023 10:27 AM UTC | Milky Way
Even though we're embedded inside the Milky Way, we don't know precisely what our galaxy looks like. Astronomers have had to build up a map of our galaxy slowly and carefully by measuring the distance to various structures and mapping them into three dimensions. What would it look like if you could travel millions of light-years away and observe the galaxy from afar? How would its overall chemical composition compare to other galaxies in the Universe?
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Touch Galaxies and Listen to Black Holes. Now You Can Explore the Universe With Multiple Senses

By Brian Koberlein - June 27, 2023 11:24 AM UTC | Site News
Astronomy is a visual science, gathering data with electromagnetic radiation with different detectors, including our eyes. Now experts have converted various visual images into sonograms, allowing you to listen to the pictures. This is perfect for people with vision problems but also allows a different sense to spot exciting features that your eyes might miss. They've also created tactile versions of astronomical objects so you can feel the structures of galaxies, black holes, and star-forming nebulae with your hands.
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Watching the Watchers With Nancy Grace Roman

By Brian Koberlein - June 26, 2023 02:53 PM UTC | Telescopes
Astronomers have discovered thousands of planets using the transit technique, watching how distant stars dim as a planet passes in between us and the star. A small group of stars is lined up so alien astronomers can discover Earth using the same transit technique. In a new paper, researchers suggest that the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Telescope should scan this Earth's transiting zone for habitable planets. If there are other advanced civilizations there, they should know we're here and would be the ideal places to search for signs of intelligence.
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Another Key Amino Acid Found in Space: Tryptophan

By Brian Koberlein - June 25, 2023 01:26 PM UTC | Astrobiology
Astronomers continue to find more and more of the building blocks of life out in space. This time, researchers have announced the discovery of the amino acid tryptophan. They used data from the Spitzer Space Telescope when it observed the Perseus Molecular Complex in the IC348 star system located about 1,000 light-years from Earth. Tryptophan is one of the 20 essential amino acids used in protein formation by life on Earth. It produces a rich spectral signature in infrared, so it was the ideal target for Spitzer and will make an excellent follow-on objective for JWST.
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Extending Earth's Internet to Mars With Orbital Data Servers

By Brian Koberlein - June 24, 2023 04:56 PM UTC | Space Exploration
More spacecraft is due to fly to Mars and will send their data home. Human explorers will want to access research documents and communicate the findings to Earth. This will require extending Earth's internet to Mars. A new study suggests that Mars will eventually require its constellation of satellites, provide local computing at Mars, and supply as much information as possible locally.
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There Could Be Captured Planets in the Oort Cloud

By Brian Koberlein - June 24, 2023 11:17 AM UTC | Planetary Science
The early Solar System was a turbulent and chaotic place with icy material hurled far from the Sun, becoming the Oort Cloud. Larger objects and planets were probably hurled into the Oort Cloud too, and some might have been kicked out of the Solar System entirely. If a similar situation happened in other star systems, planets could lurk out in the Oort Cloud.
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