Latest Parsec Stories

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Astronomers have reportedly discovered the largest known structure in the universe – a formation so massive it would take a vehicle that was moving at light speed roughly four billion light years to cross it, the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) announced on Thursday. The structure is a large quasar group (LQG), or a formation that contains the nuclei of galaxies from the earliest days of the universe’s existence. These quasar...

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have ruled out an alternate theory on the nature of dark energy after recalculating the expansion rate of the universe to unprecedented accuracy.The universe appears to be expanding at an increasing rate. Some believe that is because the universe is filled with a dark energy that works in the opposite way of gravity. One alternative to that hypothesis is that an enormous bubble of relatively empty space eight billion light-years across surrounds...

Astronomy & Astrophysics is publishing new 3D maps of the interstellar gas in the local area around our Sun. A French-American team of astronomers presents new absorption measurements towards more than 1800 stars. They were able to characterize the properties of the interstellar gas within each sight line.This week, Astronomy & Astrophysics publishes new 3D maps of the interstellar gas situated in an area 300 parsecs around the Sun. A French-American team of astronomers presents new...

Ohio State University researchers have found a way to measure distances to objects three times farther away in outer space than previously possible, by extending a common measurement technique.They discovered that a rare type of giant star, often overlooked by astronomers, could make an excellent signpost for distances up to 300 million light years -- and beyond.Along the way, they also learned something new about how these stars evolve.Cepheid variables -- giant stars that pulse in...

With its powerful detectors, Integral has performed the most-sensitive all-sky survey ever, finding expected clumpy areas at large scales in our local universe. Scientists working with ground-based telescopes have found the same local clumps, while looking for sources of cosmic showers.Integral performed the survey in the hard X-ray band of the electromagnetic spectrum. Although it wasn't the first such survey, Integral's strength lies in the fact that it is unbiased towards sources that are...

A critically important number that specifies the expansion rate of the Universe, the so-called Hubble constant, has been independently determined using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. This new value matches recent measurements using other methods and extends their validity to greater distances, thus allowing astronomers to probe earlier epochs in the evolution of the Universe. "The reason this result is so significant is that we need the Hubble constant to tell us the size of the...