Different measures of the rate of the Universe’s expansion give different results – and a new measurement technique only makes matters more complicated.
Astronomers have found that mysterious dark energy may originate in black holes.
When two neutron stars merge and create a black hole, they produce a powerful blast of gamma rays.
A. Simonnet (Sonoma State Univ.) and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Gamma-ray bursts occur when a massive star explodes or when two neutron stars merge. A newly discovered burst has puzzled astronomers, as it lasted much longer than astronomers would have expected.
Image of a Wolf Rayet star – potentially before collapsing into a black hole.
ESO/L. Calçada
David Yong, Australian National University and Gary Da Costa, Australian National University
The discovery of an ancient star in the Milky Way’s halo is providing evidence for another source that would have produced the galaxy’s heavy elements.
Gravitational waves reveal the demise of super-dense neutron stars spiralling into their black hole companions - the first time such strange and exotic star systems have ever been observed.
Traces of radioactive iron from the ocean floor, Antartica and the Moon reveal several waves of dust from distant stars over the past 10 million years.
Artist impression of merging black holes.
Mark Myers, ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav)
New discovery settles a wager between astrophysicists: black holes can merge repeatedly.
Woodcut from Camille Flammarion’s 1888 book L'Atmosphère : météorologie populaire. The caption reads: ‘A missionary of the Middle Ages tells that he had found the point where the sky and the Earth touch’ and continues, ‘What is there, then, in this blue sky, which certainly exists, and which veils the stars during the day?’
Wikipedia
Albert Einstein may have been the ultimate example of a visionary genius, but that did not stop him from twice losing his way due to beliefs that were perhaps not so scientific.
When scientists created the Higgs particle with protons, they needed the 10km-wide Large Hadron Collider. A muon machine could achieve it with a diameter of just 200 metres.
Betelguese is the red star in the top right quarter of the picture.
Odd event could be explained by a star being ripped apart by a black hole.
The good thing about space is that – even though it has lots of dangerous stuff floating in it, and lots of exploding stars – it’s so big and empty that it almost doesn’t matter.
NASA/CXC/U.Texas
Brad Carter, University of Southern Queensland and Jake Clark, University of Southern Queensland
There are lots of places where it’s much, much hotter than the Sun. And the amazing thing is that this heat also makes new atoms - tiny particles that have made their way long ago from stars to us.
The bubbly cloud, called Puppis A, is an irregular shock wave, generated by a supernova that would have been witnessed on Earth 3,700 years ago.
NASA
A massive star, with a radius 500 times that of our sun, exploded. But the supernova fizzled – it was weak and dim. Figuring out what went wrong led to insights about how rare binary star systems form.
The ALMA telescope has seen tantalising hints of a violent event.
ESO/B. Tafreshi/TWAN (twanight.org)
Our brain cells do look a lot like a map of the universe – but that doesn’t mean they’re the same thing.
Technicians prepare Swift’s UVOT for vibration testing on Aug. 1, 2002, more than two years before launch, in the High Bay Clean Room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
The Swift Observatory passed a milestone: 1 million snapshots of the universe. These exquisite and revealing pictures have captured the births and deaths of stars, gravitational waves and comets.