Behold, The Most Accurate Virtual Simulation of Our Universe to Date

In the Cosmic Calendar, which maps the chronology of the Universe across a single Earth year, modern humans don’t appear until the very last minute of December 31. Everything we understand about the evolution of the Universe, we’ve had to piece together. We simply haven’t been around for pretty much any of the 13.7 billion-year … Read more

Major African Radio Telescope Will Help to Image Black Holes

Astronomers across Africa and Europe have reacted with delight to news that Africa’s first millimetre-range radio telescope is to be built. The Africa Millimetre Telescope will fill a gap in the coverage of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a global network of telescopes that can receive and analyse radio waves of around 1 millimetre in … Read more

Major African Radio Telescope Will Help to Image Black Holes

Astronomers across Africa and Europe have reacted with delight to news that Africa’s first millimetre-range radio telescope is to be built. The Africa Millimetre Telescope will fill a gap in the coverage of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a global network of telescopes that can receive and analyse radio waves of around 1 millimetre in … Read more

What is the biggest thing in the universe?

Scientists have created the first map of a colossal supercluster of galaxies known as Laniakea, the home of Earth’s Milky Way galaxy and many other. This computer simulation, a still from a Nature journal video, depicts the giant supercluster, with the Milky Way’s location shown as a red dot. (Image credit: Nature Video) The biggest … Read more

How does terraforming work in the Alien universe?

The subject of terraforming lies at the center of James Cameron’s Aliens, at least when it comes to worldbuilding. Released in 1979, Ridley Scott’s Alien already saw a group of space truckers visit an unknown “planetoid,” which would later become LV-426 in the 1986 sequel. And spacesuits weren’t needed anymore to walk on its surface … Read more

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is cooling down for its next trick: Observing the universe

It’s been a whirlwind 38 days in space for the James Webb Space Telescope, but its chief scientist says the mission is well on track to uncover the universe soon. “The telescope is cold … the instruments are cooling,” John Mather, a Nobel laureate and astrophysicist who also works at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in … Read more

A Cosmic Water Cloud Shadow Has Revealed The Temperature of The Early Universe

Sometimes astronomers and astrophysicists are working at such gigantic, mind-bending scales – in terms of both distance and time – that you can’t help but be awestruck at the new discoveries they keep coming out with.   Case in point: a temperature check of the Universe in its youngest phase, just 880 million years after … Read more

Mind-Bending New Multiverse Scenario Could Explain a Strange Higgs Boson Feature

When researchers at the Large Hadron Collider discovered the elusive Higgs particle in 2012, it was a landmark for particle physics. It solved a very thorny problem, validating and allowing the Standard Model of particle physics to hold.   But, as is often the case with new discoveries, while some questions were neatly answered, others … Read more

Astronomers Find First-Ever Rogue Black Hole Adrift in the Milky Way

These are boom times for astronomers hunting black holes. The biggest ones—supermassive black holes that can weigh billions of suns—have been found at the centers of most every galaxy, and we have even managed to image one. Meanwhile, researchers now routinely detect gravitational waves rippling through the universe from smaller merging black holes. Closer to … Read more