Astronomers found something not predicted by current theory when they took a closer look at the emissions from a neutron star with a very strong magnetic field.
Captured: approximately 15,000 galaxies (12,000 of which are star-forming) widely distributed in time and space.
NASA, ESA, P. Oesch (University of Geneva), and M. Montes (University of New South Wales)
Astronomers are voting to rename one of the laws of physics. The voting may have far-reaching effects leading to renaming of other laws and giving ‘forgotten’ scientists due credit.
An illustration of two neutron stars spinning around each other while merging.
NASA/CXC/Trinity University/D. Pooley et al.
Astronomers are now able to detect a host of signals streaming through the universe. This newfound ability is like gaining new senses and it’s opening the door to understanding the cosmos.
The other galaxies are there, but they are hiding a very long way away.
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We are in the Milky Way. If you travelled on an extremely fast spaceship for more than two million years, you would reach our neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy. All other galaxies are even further away.
HIRAX prototype dishes at Hartebeesthoek Astronomy Observatory near Johannesburg.
Kabelo Kesebonye
The planets we can see in the sky were known to the ancient Greeks as ‘wandering stars’. But they appeared much earlier in the stories and traditions of Australia’s Indigenous people.
A podcast all about nothing. From the importance of doing nothing to the ill-effects of time spent in solitary confinement and what nothing means in space.
A detector buried under more than a mile of ice in Antarctica has detected a high-energy subatomic neutrino and traced it to its origin, a blazar – a gargantuan black hole more than a billion times more massive than the sun.
School children at the site of the KAT-7 radio telescope in Carnarvon, South Africa.
Kevin Govender
An astronomer suggests an idea to piggyback on the ambitious Breakthrough Starshot project that aims to send nano spacecraft to Alpha Centauri at a major fraction of the speed of light.
US F/A-18 footage of a UFO (circled in red).
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Parzival191919
Kevin Knuth, University at Albany, State University of New York
About 5 percent of all UFO sightings cannot be easily explained by weather or human technology. A physicist argues that there’s compelling evidence to justify serious scientific study and that the skeptics should step aside – for the sake of humanity.
The Northern Hemisphere gets its biggest dose of daylight.
Takmeng Wong and the CERES Science Team at NASA Langley Research Center
Pretty much as soon as we understood what galaxies were, we realised they are all moving away from each other. And the ones that are further away are moving faster. In short, the universe is expanding.
Galaxy cluster MACS J1149.5+2223 taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. The inset image is the very distant galaxy MACS1149-JD1.
ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, W. Zheng (JHU), M. Postman (STScI), the CLASH Team, Hashimoto et al.
Astronomers have indirectly spotted some of the first stars in the universe by making their most distant detection of oxygen in a galaxy that existed just 500m years after the Big Bang.
An artist’s illustration of a black hole “eating” a star.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Eileen Meyer, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Astronomers are gathering an exponentially greater amount of data every day – so much that it will take years to uncover all the hidden signals buried in the archives.