Latest Big Bang Stories
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Dark Energy is one of the major puzzles of modern astronomy, and one tool that astronomers use to understand this force is encoded in the distribution of clusters of galaxies. A new study by a team of astronomers, led by Dr. Jeeseon Song at the University of Michigan, has yielded exquisitely precise distances of a large sample of clusters. These precise distances may lead to breakthroughs in understanding the expansion history of our...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Some 24 robotic arms attached to a new high tech instrument have been transported from Edinburgh, Scotland to a Chilean mountaintop in the hope that some of the key questions surrounding the beginnings of the Universe will be answered in greater detail than ever before. The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has provisionally accepted KMOS after testing was completed at the UK Astronomy Technology Centre (UK ATC) in Edinburgh....
The winners of a contest that encourages scientists and students across the globe to explore fundamental, big questions in astronomy and cosmology will present their proposals and essays in a joint conference Oct. 12-13 at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. The New Frontiers in Astronomy & Cosmology International Grant and Essay Competition, led by Donald G. York, the Horace B. Horton Professor in Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, will award more than $4...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Researchers using the Hubble Telescope have assembled a new and improved portrait of our deepest-ever view of the Universe. The eXtreme Deep Field (XDF) photo was compiled by combining ten years worth of NASA and ESA Hubble Space Telescope observations taken of a patch of sky within the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is a small area of space in the Fornax (The Furnace) constellation created using Hubble...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers have developed an algorithm that is able to chart and explain accurately the structure and dynamics of the universe. The team developed a new algorithm based on artificial intelligence which provides results that are close to the observed distribution of motion and galaxies. It has been hard for astronomers to explain the distribution of galaxies. Five percent of the universe is made of normal matter, making up the...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, light took off, then traveled 13.2 billion light-years until it was finally picked up by NASA's telescopes. Astronomers have identified the furthest galaxy ever using NASA's Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes. The light captured by the telescope was from when the universe was just 500 million years old, according to NASA. "This galaxy is the most distant object we have ever observed...
WASHINGTON, Sept. 19, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- With the combined power of NASA's Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes, as well as a cosmic magnification effect, astronomers have spotted what could be the most distant galaxy ever seen. Light from the young galaxy captured by the orbiting observatories first shone when our 13.7-billion-year-old universe was just 500 million years old. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The far-off galaxy existed...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Researchers are finding ways to map out the spread and structure of the universe through the light of quasars. Scientists have developed a technique that could offer up a never before seen look back to a time just after the Big Bang. They found, while analyzing the visible light from a small group of quasars, that patterns of light variation over time were consistent from one quasar to another when corrected for the celestial...
LOS ANGELES, Sept. 17, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- YG Entertainment and Live Nation announce the first ever U.S. tour dates by world famous Korean group BIGBANG. Two concerts have been confirmed in the United States, part of the BIGBANG ALIVE GALAXY GLOBAL TOUR 2012, including November 3rd at the Honda Center in Anaheim, California, and November 9th at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey. Tickets for both shows go on sale at 10:00 am (ET/PT) Saturday, September 22, 2012 at...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Since the 1990's, dark energy has been the most accepted hypothesis to explain the expansion rate of the Universe. A hypothetical form of energy, dark energy is thought to permeate all of space and accounts for about 73% of the total mass-energy of the universe. According to a team of astronomers from the University of Portsmouth and LMU University Munich, dark energy isn't so theoretical anymore. They say, it is really there....
Latest Big Bang Reference Libraries
Image Caption: The Hubble Extreme Deep Field (XDF) was completed in September 2012 and shows the farthest galaxies ever photographed by humans. Each speck of light in the photo is an individual galaxy, some of them as old as 13.2 billion years; the observable universe is estimated to contain more than 200 billion galaxies. Credit: NASA/Wikipedia What is Cosmology? I once commented to an acquaintance that I was fascinated by the field of Cosmology, and mused that if I had more time, I...
Large-Scale Structure of the Cosmos -- Stars are organised into galaxies which in turn appear to form clusters and superclusters, separated by voids. Prior to 1989 it was commonly assumed that the superclusters were the largest structures in existence, and that they were distributed more-or-less uniformly throughout the universe in every direction. However, in 1989, Margaret Geller and John Huchra discovered the "Great Wall", a sheet of galaxies more than 500 million light years long...
Cosmology -- area of science that aims at a comprehensive theory of the structure and evolution of the entire physical universe. Modern Cosmological Theories Present models of the universe hold two fundamental premises: the cosmological principle and the dominant role of gravitation. Derived by Hubble, the cosmological principle holds that if a large enough sample of galaxies is considered, the universe looks the same from all positions and in all directions in space. The second point...
Redshift -- Redshift is the phenomenon that the frequency of light when observed, under certain circumstances, can be lower than the frequency of light when it was emitted at the source. This usually occurs when the source moves away from the observer, as in the Doppler effect. More specifically, the term redshift is used for the observation that the spectrum of light emitted by distant galaxies is shifted to lower frequencies (towards the red end of the spectrum, hence the name) when...
Quasar -- A quasar (from quasi-stellar radio source) is an astronomical object that looks like a star in optical telescopes (i.e. it is a point source), but has a very high redshift. The general consensus is that this high redshift is cosmological, the result of Hubble's law and that their redshift indicates that they are typically very distant from Earth; we observe them as they were several billions of years ago. Since we can see them despite their distance, they must emit more...
