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With the rapid expansion of commercial space, there is a growing number of satellites in orbit around our planet. Most of these are in low-Earth orbit, which is becoming increasingly crowded. This has led some to be concerned about a catastrophic rise of space debris, as well as a growing frustration by astronomers due … Read more
The universe was born with the Big Bang as an unimaginably hot, dense point. When the universe was just 10-34 of a second or so old — that is, a hundredth of a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second in age — it experienced an incredible burst of expansion known as … Read more
It’s full of stars.
A modified telescope in Arizona has produced an interim map, which is already the largest three-dimensional map of the universe ever — and the instrument is only about a tenth of the way through its five-year mission. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), a collaboration between Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and scientists around … Read more
Astrophysicists hope a map created by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument will help answer questions about the expansion of the universe Space 13 January 2022 By Jason Arunn Murugesu The telescope where DESI is mounted at Kitt Peak National Observatory, Arizona KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/P. Marenfeld The largest 3D map of the universe has been created by a … Read more
Ever since scientists made the first detection of gravitational waves from a pair of colliding black holes in 2015, evidence has been growing that the Universe ought to be full of them. Every massive event – every black hole or neutron star merger, every supernova – should have sent gravitational waves ringing out across … Read more
This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Written by Sara Webb, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, Swinburne University of Technology. By far my favorite thing about my job as an astronomer is those rare moments when I get to see beautiful distant … Read more
A dense, magnetic star violently erupted and spat out as much energy as a billion suns — and it happened in a fraction of a second, scientists recently reported. This type of star, known as a magnetar, is a neutron star with an exceptionally strong magnetic field, and magnetars often flare spectacularly and without warning. But even though … Read more
The James Webb Space Telescope fully deployed its tennis-court sized sunshield Tuesday, a critical milestone for the success of its mission to study every phase of cosmic history, NASA said. “All five layers of the sunshield are fully tensioned,” said an announcer at the observatory’s control center in Baltimore, where team members cheered, a … Read more
“The last star will slowly cool and fade away. With its passing, the Universe will become once more a void, without light or life or meaning.” So warned the physicist Brian Cox in the recent BBC series Universe. The fading of that last star will only be the beginning of an infinitely long, dark epoch. … Read more