Latest Physical cosmology Stories
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online An astronomer wrote in the journal Physical Review Letters about a new mechanism for the magnetization of the early universe. Before stars formed, luminous matter consisted only of fully ionized gas of protons, electrons, helium nuclei and lithium nuclei which were produced during the Big Bang. “All higher metals, for example, magnetic iron could, according to today’s conception, only be formed in the inside of stars," Dr....
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online The researchers in charge of an award-winning space mission that set out to collect fundamental measurements of the universe have announced they will be releasing their final results after nearly a decade of work. The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which was launched in June 2001, has collected data that has "revolutionized our view of the universe, establishing a cosmological model that explains a widely diverse...
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Starting in early 2013 redOrbit will be launching a new podcast series called Your Universe Today, where we interview leading scientists about cutting-edge research in everything from space travel to the origins of our Universe. But we’re in the holiday spirit and couldn’t wait until January to unveil our new podcast project, so we’ve decided to give you a sneak peak of what’s to come. In the first of many...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers have discovered seven primitive galaxies that formed more than 13 billion years ago, during the Universe's infancy. The find includes a candidate galaxy that could hold the record for the most distant galaxy ever found. Scientists made the new discoveries using the Hubble Space Telescope's Hubble Ultra Deep Field project, which aims to improve our understanding of the early Universe. Astronomers are looking back at...
WASHINGTON, Dec. 12, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers announced Dec. 12 they have seen further back in time than ever before and have uncovered a previously unseen population of seven primitive galaxies that formed more than 13 billion years ago, when the universe was less than 3 percent of its present age. The deepest images to date from Hubble yield the first statistically robust sample of galaxies that tells how abundant they were...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online As grand and colorful as it is, our solar system is a fleck in the grander cosmos. Our Milky Way galaxy has hundreds of billions of solar systems, yet it is only just a drop in the sea of galaxies. Galaxy clusters, the rarest and largest of galaxy groupings, can be the hardest to find, which is where NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) becomes helpful. So far, the mission's all-sky infrared maps have revealed one...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The universe has had traces of heavy elements such as carbon and oxygen as far back in time as astronomers have been able to see. Elements such as these were originally churned from the explosion of massive stars. They formed the building blocks for planetary bodies, and eventually for life on Earth. Peering back far in time, a research team from MIT, Caltech, and the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) found matter...
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory $2.1 Million Grant to Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics advances dark energy research at UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab A $2.1 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to the University of California at Berkeley, through the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics (BCCP), will fund the development of revolutionary technologies for BigBOSS, a project now in the proposal stage designed to study dark energy with unprecedented...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers have taken a census of hundreds of previously unseen starburst galaxies, revealing high star-formation rates across the Universe. The team used the European Space Agency's Herschel space observatory and ground-based W. M. Keck Observatory to make the observation. Starburst galaxies give birth to hundreds of solar masses' worth of stars every year, while galaxies like our Milky Way produce only one Sun-like star per year....
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online A new observation of Abell 520 using the Hubble Space Telescope has helped astronomers determine that the core of the galaxy cluster is not over-dense in dark matter after all. Astronomers earlier this year spotted an overabundance of dark matter in the heart of the galaxy cluster. This observation was puzzling because dark matter and galaxies should be anchored together. Scientists have evidence that dark matter is responsible...
Latest Physical cosmology 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...
The Virgo Cluster consists of galaxies at a distance of around 59 Mly away in the constellation Virgo. Containing between 1300 to 2000 galaxies the Virgo Cluster is the heart of the Local Supercluster. Its mass is estimated at 1.2 × 1015 M☉ out to 8 degrees of the cluster's center or a radius of about 2.2 Mpc. Most of the brighter galaxies in the cluster were discovered by Charles Messier in the late 1770's and early 1780's, including the giant elliptical Messier 87. Messier...
As of 2009, JKCS 041 is a group of galaxies with the distinction of being the farthest away group from Earth ever observed. Seen at redshift 1.9, it is estimated to be 10.2 billion light years away. The cluster is located within the constellation Cetus at a photometrically determined redshift of z=1.9 at right ascension 2h 26m 44s declination -04° 41"² 37"³ (J2000.0).
Sample Entry: Astronomy is the scientific study of stars, planets, comets, galaxies, and other phenomena that occur outside Earth's atmosphere (e.g. cosmic radiation). Astronomy deals with the evolution, physics, chemical makeup, meteorology, and motion of celestial objects, and also the formation of the universe. The word Astronomy comes from the Greek words astron (meaning "star") and nomos (meaning "law"). Astronomy is one of the oldest sciences. Since the dawn of man, people always...
Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich (March 8, 1914 "“ December 2, 1987) was a productive Soviet physicist. He was instrumental in the advancement of Soviet nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, and also was an invaluable assistance in the fields of adsorption and catalysis, shock waves, nuclear physics, particle physics, astrophysics, physical cosmology, and general relativity. In 1914, he was born into a Jewish family in Minsk, now called Belarus. Four months after his birth, he and his family...
