Latest The Universe Stories

LIVERMORE, Calif., Jan. 25, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Solar Universe, the nation's leading provider of residential and small business solar installations, today announced its $7.0 million in Series B funding, led by RockPort Capital Partners with returning founding investors. The company also announced that it has added Kevin Daughtery as EVP, Operations, and Laurie Anthony Baggio as Chief Development Officer. Proceeds from the financing will be used to expand Solar Universe's successful...

Just like out of a good science fiction setting on some far-off planet, our own Earth could soon have a second sun, but only for a limited time. The cosmic phenomenon will occur when one of the brightest stars in our night sky suffers a cataclysmic event -- exploding into a supernova. The supergiant red star Betelgeuse in Orion's nebula is predicted to explode, with the impending supernova possibly even reaching Earth. According to a report released Saturday, the most spectacular light show...

TAU astronomers identify the epoch of the first fast growth of black holesMost galaxies in the universe, including our own Milky Way, harbor super-massive black holes varying in mass from about one million to about 10 billion times the size of our sun. To find them, astronomers look for the enormous amount of radiation emitted by gas which falls into such objects during the times that the black holes are "active," i.e., accreting matter. This gas "infall" into massive...

New discoveries point to it being more likely that humans are not the only inhabitants in the universe. "The evidence is just getting stronger and stronger," Carl Pilcher, director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, which studies the origins, evolution and possibilities of life in the universe, told The Associated Press (AP). "I think anybody looking at this evidence is going to say, 'There's got to be life out there.'"Scientists have an equation that calculates the odds of...

New York, NY: Sunday, December 5: StarTalk returns to the airwaves, with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson as host, and Jon Stewart as his inaugural guest. New York, NY (PRWEB) December 4, 2010 StarTalk returns to the airwaves, with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson as host, and Jon Stewart as his inaugural guest. StarTalk will be broadcast live every Sunday at 6:00 pm ET from CBS Radio Studios in New York City. StarTalk bridges the gap between Pop Culture and Pop Science with...

Researchers from Bonn and St. Andrews provide an explanation for the discrepancyNew stars are born in the Universe around the clock "“ in the Milky Way, currently about ten per year. From the birth rate in the past, we can generally calculate how populated space should actually be. But the problem is that the results of such calculations do not match our actual observations. "There should actually be a lot more stars that we can see," says Dr. Jan Pflamm-Altenburg, astrophysicist...

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has unveiled a previously unseen structure centered in the Milky Way. The feature spans 50,000 light-years and may be the remnant of an eruption from a supersized black hole at the center of our galaxy."What we see are two gamma-ray-emitting bubbles that extend 25,000 light-years north and south of the galactic center," said Doug Finkbeiner, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who first...

As scientists and engineers work to make NASA's James Webb Space Telescope a reality, they find themselves wondering what new sights the largest space-based observatory ever constructed will reveal. With Webb, astronomers aim to catch planets in the making and identify the universe's first stars and galaxies, yet these are things no telescope -- not even Hubble -- has ever shown them before. "It's an interesting problem," said Jonathan Gardner, the project's deputy senior project...

A team of astronomers has found evidence that the universe may have gone through a warming trend early in its history. They measured the temperature of the gas that lies in between galaxies, and found a clear indication that it had increased steadily over the period from when the universe was one tenth to one quarter of its current age. This cosmic climate change is most likely caused by the huge amount of energy output from young, active galaxies during this epoch. The researchers publish...

NEW YORK, Oct. 15 /PRNewswire/ -- Sharing a joint mission to map the universe, Slooh and Google today unveiled the launch of the Slooh layer in Google Earth, a live astronomy feature that brings the power of live space exploration to Google's global audience. The new Slooh "map the universe" layer integrates Slooh's Space Camera technology and worldwide network of powerful robotic mountaintop telescopes with the Google Earth application. Anyone, regardless of age or skill level, can explore...