Latest Cosmic Evolution Survey Stories
By analyzing the COSMOS field, the largest field of galaxies ever observed with the Hubble space telescope, an international team of scientists led by researchers from the California Institute of Technology (United States) and researchers from the associated laboratories of the CNRS and the CEA , made the first three-dimensional map of dark matter in the Universe using gravitational lensing effects. This historic first seems to confirm the standard theories on the formation of the large...
SEATTLE - An international team of astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has created the first three-dimensional map of the large-scale distribution of dark matter in the universe. Dark matter is an invisible form of matter whose total mass in the universe is more than five times that of "normal" matter (i.e., atoms). The nature of dark matter is still unknown. Its presence in the universe is inferred from its current influence within galaxies and clusters of galaxies, and...
VLT Survey Provides New Insight into Formation of Galaxies Using VIMOS on ESO's Very Large Telescope, a team of French and Italian astronomers have shown the strong influence the environment exerts on the way galaxies form and evolve. The scientists have for the first time charted remote parts of the Universe, showing that the distribution of galaxies has considerably evolved with time, depending on the galaxies' immediate surroundings. This surprising discovery poses new challenges for...
Astronomers analyzing two of the deepest views of the cosmos made with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered a gold mine of galaxies, more than 500 that existed less than a billion years after the Big Bang. These galaxies thrived when the cosmos was less than 7 percent of its present age of 13.7 billion years. This sample represents the most comprehensive compilation of galaxies in the early universe, researchers said.The discovery is scientifically invaluable for understanding the...
The European Space Agency's XMM-Newton X-ray observatory has already been a spectacular success in many areas of astronomy - detecting distant clusters of galaxies, the faint afterglow of enigmatic gamma ray bursts and the effects of the collision of the Deep Impact probe with comet Tempel-1. Now an innovative new approach analyses X-rays detected during the times that the satellite manoeuvres between targets - originally considered to be unusable periods - to reveal some 4,000 intensely...
PPARC -- European funding has now been agreed to start designing the world's largest telescope. The "Square Kilometre Array" (SKA) will be an international radio telescope with a collecting area of one million square metres -- equivalent to about 200 football pitches -- making SKA 200 times bigger than the University of Manchester's Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank and so the largest radio telescope ever constructed. Such a telescope would be so sensitive that it could detect TV...
