At the center of most galaxies lies a supermassive black hole, with a mass millions to billions of times that of our sun and some of the most extreme gravity in the universe. Some stars that venture too close to such black holes live to tell the tale. Rather than being completely destroyed, they survive […]
Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have spotted an extremely bright red spot in the early universe. The object resembles an enormous star, spanning the size of our solar system. But it also is putting out 100 billion times more energy than any known star can physically produce. In fact, such energies are closer to what […]
When astronomers in the eighteenth century first turned powerful telescopes toward the Milky Way, they noticed something puzzling: tight, spherical swarms of stars scattered across the sky. Now we know that each contains hundreds of thousands of suns packed into a region just a few dozen light-years across. These objects, known today as globular clusters […]
Author: Kovi Rose, Astrophysics PhD Candidate, University of Sydney Kovi Rose, University of Sydney A pair of stars spiralling around each other. That’s the origin of a new source of repeating radio bursts we’ve detected, called ASKAP J1745. In recent years, astronomers have been puzzling over mysterious bursts of radio signals, known as long-period transients […]
Dark matter is a mysterious, invisible substance that makes up about 27% of the Universe’s total energy content. We cannot see it directly, only infer its presence through the gravity it exerts. For decades, cosmologists have described dark matter haloes as the invisible scaffolding within which galaxies form and live. Every galaxy, including our own […]
When we look at the night sky, we see a scattered collection of stars and galaxies, but to an astrophysicist, these are merely the glowing foam on the crest of a much deeper, invisible ocean. The vast majority of the matter in our universe is dark matter, a substance that does not emit, absorb, or […]
Author: Enrique Gaztañaga, Professor at Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation (University of Portsmouth) Wormholes are often imagined as tunnels through space or time — shortcuts across the universe. But this image rests on a misunderstanding of work by physicists Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen. In 1935, while studying the behaviour of particles in regions of […]
A Univerity of Sydney Ph.D. student has recreated a tiny piece of the universe inside a bottle in her laboratory, producing cosmic dust from scratch. The results shed new light on how the chemical building blocks of life may have formed long before Earth existed. Linda Losurdo, a Ph.D. candidate in materials and plasma physics […]
Scientists have created the highest resolution map of the dark matter that threads through the universe—showing its influence on the formation of stars, galaxies and planets. The findings, using new data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (Webb) tells us more about how this invisible substance helped pull ordinary matter into galaxies like the Milky […]
One of the most striking discoveries made by the James Webb Space Telescope, together with earlier observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, is that many galaxies in the young universe look very different from those we see around us today. Instead of graceful spiral disks or rounded ellipses, a large fraction of galaxies observed when […]