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With 90 detections now under our belt, gravitational waves are solving riddles about the evolution of galaxies and missing black holes – and they could soon give us a glimpse of dark matter Physics 16 March 2022 By Stuart Clark Ollie Hirst IN A darkened room in Sweden, beneath a chandelier and surrounded by dozens … Read more
A new Hubble Space Telescope clearly captures the heart of a distant galaxy structured much like our own. The new image shows the “eye” of a galaxy called NGC 1097, which is located 48 million light-years away from Earth. NGC 1097 is a barred spiral galaxy, which puts it in the same category as the … Read more
In the last decades of his life, Albert Einstein hoped to unite his description of gravity with existing models of electromagnetism under a single master theory. It’s a quest that continues to vex theoretical physicists to this day. Two of our best models of reality – Einstein’s general theory of relativity and the laws of … Read more
In 2000, scientists looked to date what they thought was the oldest star in the universe. They made observations via the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Hipparcos satellite and estimated that HD140283 — or Methuselah as it’s commonly known — was a staggering 16 billion years old. Such a figure was rather baffling. After all, the … Read more
Some of the James Webb Space Telescope‘s first science investigations will probe the role that bright objects called quasars played in early galaxy evolution. Quasars are distant objects powered by black holes typically a billion times as massive as our sun. They emit energies that can climb to trillions of electron volts, exceeding the total … Read more
Gravitational waves will be mapped to unprecedented high detail when a new gravitational wave detector mission launches in 2037. This will observe black holes, neutron stars and other objects, a new study notes. The paper looks ahead to when the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) from the European Space Agency will fly into space to … Read more
What happens when two of the largest objects in the universe collide? Simple, says a new study: They create one of the largest shock waves in the universe. Located about 730 million light-years from Earth, Abell 3667 is a galaxy cluster in chaos. Actually composed of two clusters (or groups) of galaxies colliding into one another, Abell 3667 … Read more
A signal interpreted as the first light illuminating the Universe may not be from the far reaches of the Universe after all, a new study has found. In fact, it may not even be from space. Far from being a problem, however, this new finding may just set the Universe to rights. The signal, … Read more
Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of How to Die in Space. It’s one of the most compelling questions you could possibly ask, one that humanity has been asking since basically the beginning of time: What’s beyond the … Read more
China has had a bumper few years in space exploration, and its ambitions are about to get bolder. The China National Space Administration has released an overview of its plans for the next five years, which include launching a robotic craft to an asteroid, building a space telescope to rival the Hubble and laying the … Read more