For decades, scientists have searched the skies for signs of extraterrestrial technology, contacts. A study from EPFL asks a sharp question: if signals from technological aliens have already reached Earth without us noticing, what should we realistically expect to detect today? Since the first SETI experiment in 1960, astronomers have scanned the Milky Way for […]
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 […]
Astronomers have, for the first time, captured a detailed snapshot of planetary systems in an era long shrouded in mystery. The ALMA survey to Resolve exoKuiper belt Substructures (ARKS), using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), has produced the sharpest images ever of 24 debris disks, the dusty belts left after planets finish forming. These […]
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 […]
The mystery of dark matter remains one of the most profound puzzles in modern astrophysics. We know it outweighs ordinary matter by a factor of five, yet it neither shines nor absorbs light. Its presence is betrayed only by the pull of gravity, shaping galaxies and bending light from more distant objects. For decades, scientists […]
The Earth supports the only known life in the universe, all of it depending heavily on the presence of liquid water to facilitate chemical reactions. While single-celled life has existed almost as long as Earth itself, it took roughly three billion years for multicellular life to form. Human life has existed for less than one-10 […]
Astronomers have discovered potentially the most massive black hole ever detected. The cosmic behemoth is close to the theoretical upper limit of what is possible in the universe and is 10,000 times heavier than the black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy. It exists in one of the most massive galaxies […]
A team led by astronomers at Leiden University in the Netherlands and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Virginia (U.S.) have, for the first time, robustly detected semi-heavy water ice around a young sunlike star. The results strengthen the case that some of the water in our solar system formed before our sun and the […]
Using the 10.4-m Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), astronomers have detected methane in the atmosphere of WISEA J181006.18−101000.5—the closest T dwarf to Earth. Brown dwarfs are intermediate objects between planets and stars. Astronomers generally agree that they are substellar objects occupying the mass range between 13 and 80 Jupiter masses. One subclass of brown dwarfs (with […]
Author: Richard Massey, Professor of extragalactic astrophysics (dark matter and cosmology), Durham University In recent decades, we’ve learnt huge amounts about the universe and its history. The rapidly developing technology of telescopes – both on Earth and in space – has been a key part of this process, and those that are due to start […]