Space and astronomy news
[/caption] People know Albert Einstein as one of the world’s best physicists and a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physics, but you may not have heard his many quotes. Here are just some of the things the famous scientist said. Unsurprisingly, many of Einstein’s quotes are about thinking for yourself and being rational. “A …
Quintessence is one idea – hypothesis – of what dark energy is (remember that dark energy is the shorthand expression of the apparent acceleration of the expansion of the universe … or the form of mass-energy which causes this observed acceleration, in cosmological models built with Einstein’s theory of general relativity). The word quintessence means …
[/caption] Sirius B is the name of the fainter, smaller, less massive star in the Sirius binary system (the brighter, larger, more massive one is Sirius A, or just Sirius). It was hypothesized to exist almost eighteen years before it was actually observed! Details: Bessel – yep, the guy who Bessel functions are named after …
The event horizon of a black hole is the boundary (‘horizon’) between its ‘outside’ and its ‘inside’; those outside cannot know anything about things (‘events’) which happen inside. What an event horizon is – its behavior – is described by applying the equations of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity (GR); as of today, the theoretical …
[/caption] “The distance to objects beyond the Local Group is closely related to how fast they seem to be receding from us,” that’s Hubble’s law in a nutshell. Edwin Hubble, the astronomer the Hubble Space Telescope is named after, first described the relationship which later bore his name in a paper in 1929; here is …
[/caption] So you think you know your universe? We’ve got our own top 10 list on the most interesting facts about the Universe. 1. It was hot when it was young The most widely accepted cosmological model is that of the Big Bang. This was proven since the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation …
The Big Crunch is one of the scenarios predicted by scientists in which the Universe may end. Just like many others, it is based on Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. That is, if the Big Bang describes how the Universe most possibly began, the Big Crunch describes how it will end as a consequence of …
[/caption] When you throw a ball up into the air, you expect gravity will eventually slow the ball, and it will come back down again. But what if you threw a ball up into the air and instead of coming back down, it accelerated away from you? That’s basically what is happening with our universe: …
Continue reading “No “Big Rip” in our Future: Chandra Provides Insights Into Dark Energy”
Back in April, UT published an article about using a device called a ‘laser comb’ to search for Earth-like planets. But astronomers also hope to use the device to search for dark energy in an ambitious project that would measure the velocities of distant galaxies and quasars over a 20-year period. This would let astronomers …
Continue reading “‘Laser Comb’ To Measure the Accelerating Universe”
Worried about how you’re going to feed your black hole once it grows up and gets big? Have no fear. New data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory indicates that even the biggest black holes may feed just like the smallest ones. Using new observations and a detailed theoretical model, a research team compared the properties …