Latest South Pole Telescope Stories

New information obtained by scientists using a 10-meter telescope located in Antarctica has strengthened the most widely accepted explanation for the mysterious force that is behind the increasingly rapid expansion of the universe, according to a pair of press releases published this week. According to a statement from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the most recent South Pole Telescope (SPT) data "strongly" supports Albert Einstein's cosmological constant, said to be the leading...

Astronomers using the South Pole Telescope report that they have discovered the most massive galaxy cluster yet seen at a distance of 7 billion light-years. The cluster (designated SPT-CL J0546-5345) weighs in at around 800 trillion Suns, and holds hundreds of galaxies."This galaxy cluster wins the heavyweight title. It's among the most massive clusters ever found at this distance," said Mark Brodwin, a Smithsonian astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics....

Surveying the sky, XMM-Newton has discovered two massive galaxy clusters, confirming a previous detection obtained through observations of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect, the 'shadow' they cast on the Cosmic Microwave Background. The discovery, made possible thanks to a novel mosaic observing mode recently introduced on ESA's X-ray observatory, opens a new window to study the Universe's largest bound structures in a multi-wavelength approach.Galaxy clusters are the largest gravitationally...

Instrument to help astrophysicists learn what universe is made of, how it evolvesScientists aimed the South Pole Telescope at Jupiter on the evening of Feb. 16 and successfully collected the instrument's first test observations. Soon, far more distant quarry will fall under the SPT's sights as a team from nine institutions tackles one of the biggest mysteries of modern cosmological research. That mystery: What is dark energy, the force that dominates the universe?"The telescope, camera...