Confirmation bias, the psychological effect that makes people unconsciously interpret information to confirm their beliefs, is a big threat to cosmology.
A painting from Botha’s Shelter in the Ndedema Gorge in the Drakensburg, said to be home to a rich tapestry of San art and life.
Wits University Press
Formlings are representations of flying termites and their underground nests. They are associated with botantical subjects considered by the San to have great spiritual significance.
Dark matter is notoriously hard to detect, but a new experiment might finally shed light on this mysterious substance.
Dirk Dallas/Flickr
If some of the laws of physics were only infinitesimally different, we would simply not exist. It almost looks like the universe itself was built for life. But how can that be?
Elegant but elusive. Simulation of merging black holes showing gravitational waves.
NASA/ESA/wikimedia
They’re are the overachievers of the universe: incredibly dense but very small when compared to others stars. So how much do we know about the extreme behaviour of neutron stars?
A colour image of G63349, one of the galaxies in the survey, created using near-infrared (VISTA telescope) and optical (Sloan telescope) data collated by the GAMA survey. (The bright green object is a nearby star.)
ICRAR/GAMA
Our universe’s most exciting days are well behind us, with new research showing the universe is now slowly but surely dying.
Understanding how galaxies are arranged could be the key to figuring what causes the expansion of the universe.
ESA/Hubble, NASA and S. Smartt (Queen's University Belfast)
Dark matter’s mysteries are being steadily unravelled by new studies of remote galaxies.
Looking for dark matter in the galaxy collisions such as in Abell 2744, dubbed Pandora’s Cluster.
X-ray: NASA/CXC/ITA/INAF/J.Merten et al, Lensing: NASA/STScI; NAOJ/Subaru; ESO/VLT, Optical: NASA/STScI/R.Dupke
Several dwarf galaxies have been discovered close to our own Milky Way and are adding to our understanding of how galaxies form. But why haven’t astronomers seen them before?
Some of the antennas of the Murchison Widefield Array radio telescope, designed to uncover what happened in the first billion years of the universe.
Curtin University
More than 100 million years has been wiped off the age of the first stars but there is still the question of what happened in the first billion years of the universe. Earlier this month the European Space…
New data reveals no evidence of gravitational waves in the early universe, as observed by the BICEP2 radio telescope (pictured) near the South Pole.
teffen Richter, Harvard University
One of this century’s greatest potential discoveries concerning the origins of the universe has now fallen to galactic dust. That’s according to a new joint-analysis of all the existing data – including…
Matthew McConaughey
embodies the heroic scientist in Interstellar.
Paramount
Declan Fahy, American University School of Communication
Interstellar’s protagonists spend a significant portion of the movie’s 169-minute running time giving mini-lectures – sometimes with props and a little whiteboard – on theoretical physics. The characters…
This artist’s impression of the Milky Way galaxy. The blue halo of material surrounding the galaxy indicates the expected distribution of the mysterious dark matter.
ESO/L. Calçada
While invisible, dark matter completely dominates our Milky Way, recent measurements of just how much dark matter there is have revealed a bit of a mystery. In a paper published today in the Astrophysical…
A new approach to dating the birth of our solar system could help find other similar systems.
Flickr/Dmitry Boyarin
Without the sun, there would be no Earth – but amazingly, we don’t know the finer details about the prenatal history of our sun, where it was born and if other stars in our galaxy share a similar history…
The universe still holds many secrets.
Aaron Landry/Flickr
Recent observations suggest that there is something not quite right with our view of our universe – that something is skewing our view of the oldest radiation arriving at our telescopes. What’s causing…