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Stories about: Universe


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Most Complex Radio Telescope to Begin Science Operations

The Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) is the most advanced and complex radio telescope ever planned and developed. The installation features in excess of 20,000 radio antennas, spread out over 48 listening stations throughout Europe. This telescope is bound to begin scientific observations soon. All the antennas that make...

30 January 2012
10:30 GMT

Black Holes Cut New Star Birth Rates in the Early Universe

According to the conclusions of a new scientific study conducted by an international collaboration of astronomers, it would appear that the emergence of the first supermassive black holes was responsible for curbing intense stellar formation processes in the very first galaxies ever to develop. The enormous behemot...

27 January 2012
05:43 GMT

Neutrons May Be 'Leaking' into Other Universes

A new theory developed by physicist Michael Sarrazin at the University of Namur, in Belgium, argues that there is no known limitation preventing neutrons from leaking into other, parallel universes. In brane cosmology, numerous universes exist beside our own, bumping against each other and possibly interacting throu...

23 January 2012
09:36 GMT

The Scale of the Universe Is Simply Too Much to Grasp [Video]

When I first saw this video, I thought I had a very good grasp on the scale of things in the Universe. But the scale of planets, galaxies, clusters and superclusters, as presented in this video, is simply too much to grasp. If you can understand it, then treat yourself to a mint. We hear astronomers babbling about ...

19 January 2012
11:03 GMT

First-Ever Survey of Residual Light from Big Bang Completed

On Saturday, January 14, the High Frequency Instrument (HFI) aboard the European Space Agency's (ESA) Planck spacecraft ran out of its absolutely-essential coolant. While this marks the end of HFI's operating life, it also marks the completion of the first survey of residual light from the Big Bang. After...

17 January 2012
14:01 GMT

Galaxy Cluster Merger Could Unmask Dark Matter

By studying how two galaxy clusters merge, astrophysicists believe they may be able to get some deeper insights into the nature of dark matter. Such a collision is taking place about 5 billion light-years from us, and experts are dedicating all available resources to studying the phenomenon. There are hundreds of g...

16 January 2012
04:59 GMT

We May Be Living in a 'Biological' Universe

According to some of the latest investigations into the nature of molecular clouds, it would appear that we are living in a biological Universe, one that is capable of underlying life as we know it by default. The idea itself is somewhat new, but apparently most studies being carried out today contribute to confirmi...

16 January 2012
03:54 GMT

Oldest Type Ia Supernova Is 9 Billion Light-Years Away

The NASA Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), which was outfitted to the satellite in 2009, was recently able to observe the oldest-known instance of a massive stellar explosion, a Type Ia supernova that blew up more than 9 billion light-years away. What this means is that the event took place ...

13 January 2012
04:54 GMT

Sky Survey May Reveal the Composition of the Universe

For the past 12 years or so, the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys, part I, II and III, have been continuously analyzing the night sky, in an attempt to create digital 3D maps of how matter is distributed throughout. At this point, experts are trying to calculate how cosmic mass clumps up together based on these data. At th...

12 January 2012
14:01 GMT

Most Distant Galactic Protocluster Discovered

A new survey of the near-infrared sky has revealed the oldest protocluster of galaxies in the Universe. The forming structure was discovered using the NASA Hubble Space Telescope, which conducts studies in near-infrared and optical wavelengths. According to astronomers, the cluster Hubble identified recently is not ...

11 January 2012
03:53 GMT

Vendetta Online 1.8.203-204 Brings Five New Missions

Vendetta Online, a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) from Guild Software Inc, in which thousands of people can play together, at the same time, in a single, persistent universe, is now at version 1.8.203-204. Sure, it may not sound like much of an update, but Vendetta Online benefits from a flur...

28 December 2011
05:54 GMT

Extremely Distant Galaxy Is Producing New Stars

An extremely old, blob-shaped galaxy was recently demonstrated to be producing young, blue stars at a frantic pace, say astronomers with the science team. They used the NASA Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope to image the object in visible-light and infrared wavelengths. This particular galaxy &n...

22 December 2011
03:08 GMT

Supermassive Black Holes Develop at Gas Knots

A quick look at the large-scale distribution patterns of matter in the Universe will reveal the existence of what astronomers plastically refer to as the cosmic web. It is made up of thick tendrils of gas that come together at node, and apparently this is where supermassive black holes prefer to develop. This act...

13 December 2011
10:55 GMT

Bright Quasars Could Degenerate into Supermassive Black Holes

Extremely bright quasars could degenerate into supermassive black holes over the course of billions of years, experts say after studying a pair of dark behemoths that exceed any other known black hole in terms of mass and size. Quasars are the highly-active cores of distant active galactic nuclei, and they can be...

10 December 2011
06:59 GMT

ESA Dark Energy Mission Involves NASA Only Minimally

A mission dedicated to studying dark energy is essential for our understanding of the Universe, and NASA and ESA have been discussing about building a spacecraft for this purpose together for years. Now, it would seem that the European Space Agency will bear the vast majority of costs. The agencies were supposed to...

24 November 2011
10:59 GMT

NASA Reveals Old Photo Showing Age of Universe

This 9-year-old image collected by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope reveals a patch containing the oldest burnt-out star in our entire galaxy. These white dwarfs individually provide a means of assessing the age of the Universe that goes beyond studying ever-accelerating cosmic expansion. White dwarfs are the hel...

3 November 2011
03:40 GMT

Assessing the Ultimate Fate of the Universe

Since the Big Bang model established what happened at the beginning of the Universe with a fairly high degree of certainty, astronomers have been divided about how the entire thing will end. Some even say that it will not end at all. Over the years, numerous proposals dealing with the upcoming end of the Universe h...

26 October 2011
16:01 GMT

JWST May Be Used to Detect Exoplanets

Engineers constructing the successor to the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope say that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will also be able to detect exoplanets, in addition to being capable of seeing into the deepest corners of the Universe. Since the US House of Representatives proposed cutting funds for the deve...

26 October 2011
05:18 GMT

Shedding Light on the Dark Ages of the Universe

Shortly after the Big Bang, the Universe entered a period astronomers refer to as the dark ages. During this time, the host of phenomena and processes that unfolded to set the Cosmos on its current evolutionary path remain hidden from astronomers, and experts are dying to know what happened. Investigators say that ...

25 October 2011
16:01 GMT

Vastest Cosmic Structures Shouldn't Exist

One of the two most important forces controlling the fate of our Universe – gravity and dark energy – may be behaving strangely, astronomers say. The experts say that the largest cosmic structures, such as superclusters and galactic walls, should not exist. Data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) in...

24 October 2011
14:01 GMT

Astronomers Find Water in the Early Universe

For the first time ever, astronomers confirm the discovery of water vapors around a quasar located about 12 billion light-years away. This means that the object existed when the Universe was just a fraction of its current age. Water has never been found around such an ancient object before. A quasar – quasi-s...

21 October 2011
03:24 GMT

Universal Flatness May Be a Consequence of Accelerated Expansion

One of the most remarkable, yet unproven, tenants of the currently-accepted model of the Universe is that the entire Cosmos is geometrically flat. This may be a consequence of the fact that the entire thing is expanding at an ever-accelerated rate, but thus far no one has produced clear evidence of this. When astrono...

17 October 2011
10:43 GMT

Reionization Epoch Occurred Sooner Than Thought

Using the Chile-based Very Large Telescope (VLT), a group of international astronomers was able to produce the first timeline of what happened during a time in the Universe's history known as the reionization epoch. For starters, the team learned that this event occurred a lot sooner than first thought. Durin...

12 October 2011
08:45 GMT

Earliest Life May Have Emerged Shortly After Big Bang

Italian scientists from the Sapienza University in Rome propose that life developed a lot sooner in the Universe than we give it credit for. Currently, most scientists believe that the earliest lifeforms appeared here on Earth, but the new idea proposes that proto-life already existed in the Cosmos. On our planet,...

3 October 2011
08:10 GMT

Largest Model of Universal Evolution Created

Using the amazing capabilities of the NASA Pleiades supercomputer, a team of American experts was recently able to develop the most comprehensive, complex and encompassing simulation of how the Universe evolved since the Big Bang. Based on the Bolshoi simulation code, the new model was capable of producing a viab...

30 September 2011
16:01 GMT

The Universe May Not Be Accelerating

According to a newly-proposed scientific theory, Universal expansion may be nothing more than an illusion. The Greek team of astronomers that made the statement believes that the entire Cosmos is in fact decelerating, not the other way around. Experts led by cosmologist Christos Tsagas – who is based at the ...

28 September 2011
02:57 GMT

Earliest Galaxies May Be Older Than Thought

Scientists with the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge announce the discovery of very old stars inside the earliest galaxies known to have formed in the Universe. The discovery seems to hint that the galaxies themselves are in reality a lot older than first estimated. Team leader Dan Stark says that some of the ...

26 September 2011
14:21 GMT

Higgs Bosons Could Explain Universal Expansion

Investigators from Switzerland explain that the potential discovery of the Higgs boson would help astronomers and astrophysicists gain a better understanding of how the Universe expands. The finding would also enable scientists to explain how the Cosmos expanded during its earliest days. Under the guises of the St...

26 September 2011
04:31 GMT

Gravitational Waves May Explain Cosmic Puzzles

Some of the most puzzling observations that cosmologists made over the past few decades could readily be explained by the influence gravitational waves have on the way we view the Universe from our vantage point. But experts need to identify these waves if they want to use this explanation. If the waves indeed exi...

22 September 2011
09:34 GMT

Understanding Dark Energy Brought One Step Closer

A collaboration of researchers from the University of Warsaw (FUW) Faculty of Physics and the University of Naples Federico II announce the development of a new method for measuring cosmic distances. They say their approach uses the properties of gamma-ray bursts for this purpose. In addition to the obvious use in...

20 September 2011
03:42 GMT

A Third of the High-Energy Universe Remains a Mystery

On September 9, participants at the American Astronomical Society's High Energy Astrophysics Division meeting in Newport, Rhodes Island, were treated to the conclusions of the newest, yearly report of cosmic gamma-ray sources compiled by the NASA Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.The instrument, which is capable o...

10 September 2011
06:45 GMT

Star Formation Stopped When Dark Energy Took Over

In-depth studies of the Universe have revealed years ago that the overall rate of star formation peaked when the Cosmos was only a few billion years old. Since then, it has been in a steep decline, and a new study proposes that dark energy may somehow be responsible for this. When it comes to forming new stars &ndash...

25 August 2011
16:01 GMT

Life May Emerge Spontaneously Across the Universe

In a recent series of experiments, experts were able to demonstrate that the 20 amino-acids currently making up the basis of all lifeforms were not selected at random. Of the 100+ such molecules, this set proved to be the most efficient. This hints at the fact that life can arise on a whim on other worlds too.For yea...

22 August 2011
08:13 GMT

Milky Way's Oldest Stars Came from Other Galaxies

An international collaboration of researchers determined that the most ancient stars observable in the Milky Way were not in fact produced within our galaxy. These objects are what remains of old galaxies that once collided with our own, helping it grow to its current size. Though not particularly large, the Milky Wa...

9 August 2011
10:41 GMT

Pulsars Can Be Used to Study Gravitational Waves

According to the results of a new scientific study, it would appear that weird cosmic objects known as pulsars could potentially be used to study gravitational waves produced by supermassive black holes. This line of study is still in its earliest days, but experts believe that the data they accumulate as studies of ...

9 August 2011
09:51 GMT

Using Black Hole as Quantum Computer Devices

For several years, physicists have been trying to harness the power of quantum physics to produce a quantum computer. This device would far exceed the capabilities of normal computers, but building it is proven to be very hard. Researchers now propose using black holes as quantum computers.According to Seth Lloyd, wh...

8 August 2011
05:42 GMT

Making the Case for the 'Bubble Universe'

Physicists have recently taken an interest in testing to see whether the Multiverse hypothesis is correct or not. This idea holds that the entire Universe is contained within a bubble, which is itself just one of many such bubbles in the Multiverse. Though this idea has been proposed some time ago, experts are only n...

4 August 2011
07:40 GMT

Experts Simulate the End of Time

A group of investigators at the University of Maryland, in the United States, announce that they were recently able to simulate the end of time. They say that the conditions they replicated are known to astronomers as the Big Crunch, or the final event to take place in the Universe. What the scientists determined ...

30 July 2011
04:02 GMT

Enormous Water Mass Found Around Distant Quasar

Experts announce the discovery of 140 trillion times more water than our entire planet holds, in an enormous cloud surrounding a quasi-stellar radio source (quasar). Astronomers say that this is the largest and oldest water cloud ever discovered in the Universe. According to early estimates, the cloud is about 12 ...

23 July 2011
02:12 GMT

Dark Matter Evolved Just Like Normal Matter

Since the Big Bang exploded the Universe into being more than 13.75 billion years ago, large-scale cosmic structures have evolved following roughly the same patterns, regardless of whether they are made up of normal matter or dark matter. This is the groundbreaking conclusion of a new computer model analyzing the sit...

21 July 2011
09:52 GMT

Analyzing Black Holes at the Edge of the Early Universe

In the near future, astronomers could become able to conduct in-depth studies of supermassive stars that may have existed at the fringes of the early Universe. These objects may have been the progenitors of what would become the first supermassive black holes ever to exist. Instruments such as the NASA James Webb Spa...

18 July 2011
05:03 GMT

Speed of Light May Have Varied in the Early Universe

Modern-day physicists take the speed of light as one of the most reliable measures and constant in science, but some experts are proposing that this level of confidence may be excessive. They are saying that the light may have traveled at a different speed in the early Universe. Portuguese cosmologist João Mag...

15 July 2011
03:58 GMT

Matter Is Clumpy in the Distant Universe

Using the latest astronomical techniques and equipment, experts were recently able to map out the distribution of matter across the distant Universe, and found it to be more clumped up together than theories would have suggested. The work also provides more evidence that dark energy is real. In order to gain a better...

13 July 2011
04:16 GMT

Dwarf Galaxy Studies Hinder Theories on Galactic Formation

Understanding the formation of large, spiral and barrel galaxies is one of the main objectives of astronomy, but this line of research is in fact hindered by observations of dwarf galaxies. The data astronomers observe when studying these objects do not match theoretical predictions. Until recently, astronomers were ...

11 July 2011
09:27 GMT

Early Universe May Have Spun on Its Axis

University of Michigan (U-M) physics professor Michael Longo and his research team have recently determined that the early Universe may have not displayed mirror symmetry. For a long time, experts have believed that the Cosmos was symmetric from any point of view. Astrophysicists compare this to a basketball &nda...

9 July 2011
03:27 GMT

The Effects of Canceling the James Webb Space Telescope

The 2012 NASA budget bill proposed by the US House Appropriations commerce, justice, science subcommittee calls for the cancellation of the NASA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), but the scientific community is highlighting just how devastating that would be. Over the past decades, it's undeniable that remarkab...

8 July 2011
03:51 GMT

Supernovae Are Universal Dust Factories

Astronomers using the European Space Agency's (ESA) Herschel Space Observatory announce the discovery of massive volumes of dust in supernova remnants. The finding confirms the theory which holds that the violent death of massive stars is responsible for seeding heavy elements in the Cosmos.Determining which mec...

8 July 2011
03:22 GMT

Small Device Could Reveal the Universe's Youth Years

A silicon wafer just four inches in diameter holds all the scientific instruments needed to obtain clear views of how the Universe looked like in its infancy. The device, which is still under development, will be 10,000 times more sensitive than current, state-of-the-art instruments. The goal of such a device would b...

1 July 2011
04:48 GMT

Seeing an Universe Before our Own

University of Oxford theoretical physicist Roger Penrose is convinced that our Universe is not the first of its kind. His newest theory argues that a number of eons occurred before this one, and that the Big Band that spawned our Cosmos is just the latest in a string of many. But how can we test this?What the expert ...

28 June 2011
09:55 GMT


More: next 50 >>

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