Tag: universe

Elliptical galaxies shed new light on dark matter

In the 1930s, it was first noticed that the dynamics of astrophysical objects (galaxies, galaxy clusters and the universe itself) required an invisible and unknown form of mass, known now as dark matter. Strong mass discrepancies in spiral galaxies measured in the 1970s gave new weight to the concept of dark matter and motivated physicists to propose a number of dark…

Forecasting the hunt for the first supermassive black holes

It is believed that the formation and growth of most galaxies across the history of the universe has been fueled by supermassive black holes growing together with their host galaxy as they collect matter to attain millions of solar masses. Chasing the early stages of these extreme objects is among the missions of future powerful telescopes. Source: https://phys.org/news/2019-05-supermassive-black-holes.html…

Oliver Sacks’ Recommended Reading List of 46 Books: From Plants and Neuroscience, to Poetry and the Prose of Nabokov

Image by Luigi Novi. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons We remember Oliver Sacks as a neurologist, but we remember him not least because he wrote quite a few books as well. If you read those books, you’ll get a sense of Sacks’ wide range of interests — invention, perception and misperception, hallucination, and […]

Oliver Sacks’ Recommended Reading List of…

Simulating stars’ sounds to reveal their secrets

“A cello sounds like a cello because of its size and shape,” said astronomer Jacqueline Goldstein. “The vibrations of stars also depend on their size and structure.” Source: https://earthsky.org/space/simulating-stars-sounds-to-reveal-their-secrets…

The universe is 2.5 billion times less magnetic than a fridge magnet

Astronomers have calculate the magnetism of the entire universe by studying the space between galaxies, and it turns out to be very weak indeed Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2202343-the-universe-is-2-5-billion-times-less-magnetic-than-a-fridge-magnet/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…

Suppressed star formation in the early universe

Massive clusters of galaxies, some with more mass than a hundred Milky Way galaxies, have been detected from cosmic epochs as early as about three billion years after the big bang. Their ongoing star formation makes them bright enough to be detected at these distances. These kinds of clusters were predicted by simulations of cosmological evolution but their properties are very…