Astronomers have identified a nearby extrasolar world that is not only terrestrial in nature, but also ancient. Situated a mere 280 light years from t… Source: https://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/news/342975/nearby-planet-is-almost-as-old-as-the-universe…
Tag: the universe
Theia 456 is a stretched-out stream of sibling stars
A close look at the “stellar stream” known as Theia 456 finds it contains contains 468 stars born at the same time. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/theia-456-stellar-stream-468-stars-born-together…
Doubling the number of known gravitational lenses
Data from the DESI (Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument) Legacy Imaging Surveys have revealed over 1200 new gravitational lenses, approximately doubling the number of known lenses. Discovered using machine learning trained on real data, these warped and stretched images of distant galaxies provide astronomers with a flood of new targets with which to measure fundamental properties of the Universe such as the…
Students discover bright lensed galaxy in the early universe
The night sky is a natural time machine, used by cosmologists to explore the origins and evolution of the universe. Reaching into the depths of the past, a class of undergraduate students at the University of Chicago sought to do the same—and uncovered an extraordinarily distant galaxy in the early cosmos. Source: https://phys.org/news/2021-01-students-bright-lensed-galaxy-early.html…
A new record for the most distant quasar
Astronomers have a new measurement for the distance of quasar J0313-1806, making it the new record-holder for the most distant quasar known. We’re seeing it just 670 million years after the Big Bang, or more than 13 billion light-years away. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/new-record-most-distant-quasar-black-hole-j0313-1806…
Wormholes may be lurking in the universe—and new studies are proposing ways of finding them
Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity profoundly changed our thinking about fundamental concepts in physics, such as space and time. But it also left us with some deep mysteries. One was black holes, which were only unequivocally detected over the past few years. Another was “wormholes”—bridges connecting different points in spacetime, in theory providing shortcuts for space travelers. Source: https://phys.org/news/2021-01-wormholes-lurking-universeand-ways.html…
Stunning photo shows Virgo upgrade ready to hunt gravitational waves
This dazzling image shows the upgraded and more sensitive Advanced Virgo+ detector, which hunts for clues about the universe that are contained in gravitational waves Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24933173-200-stunning-photo-shows-virgo-upgrade-ready-to-hunt-gravitational-waves/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
Astronomers find signature of magnetar outbursts in nearby galaxies
Apart from black holes, magnetars may be the most extreme stars in the universe. With a diameter less than the length of Manhattan, they pack more mass than that of our sun, wield the largest magnetic field of any known object—more than 10 trillion times stronger than a refrigerator magnet—and spin on their axes every few seconds. Source: https://phys.org/news/2021-01-astronomers-signature-magnetar-outbursts-nearby.html…
Rare star’s giant gamma-ray burst GRB 200415A captured close to our home galaxy
Earth gets blasted by mild short gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) most days. But sometimes, a giant flare like GRB 200415A arrives at our galaxy, sweeping along energy that dwarfs our sun. In fact, the most powerful explosions in the universe are gamma-ray bursts. Source: https://phys.org/news/2021-01-rare-star-giant-gamma-ray-grb.html…
NASA Spacecraft Discovers the Universe is Less Crowded Than We Thought
An anonymous reader shares a report: While we might think of space as a vast sea of blackness, all we have to do is look up at night to see that it’s punctuated by countless stars, galaxies and even a few planets visible to the naked eye. Scientists recently used data from NASA’s New Horizons mission out beyond Pluto to measure…