Latest Universe 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...
[Watch the Video: A close look at the globular star cluster 47 Tucanae] redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Using their Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), astronomers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have managed to capture a new infrared image of 47 Tucanae, the second most massive globular cluster in the galaxy. The picture, which was released by the ESO on Thursday, depicts the cluster “in striking detail,” the...
[ Listen to the Podcast “The Search For Dark Energy” ] redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online A popular theory that relies on dark energy, thought to be the main contributor to the accelerating expansion of the Universe does not fit newly obtained data with regards to one fundamental constant – the proton to electron mass ratio. Rodger Thompson, a University of Arizona astronomy professor, disclosed his findings Wednesday at the American Astronomical Society...
WASHINGTON, Jan. 7, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Unlike with some blockbuster films, the sequel to a movie from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory is better than the first. This latest movie features a deeper look at a fast moving jet of particles produced by a rapidly rotating neutron star, and may provide new insight into the nature of some of the densest matter in the universe. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The hero of this Chandra movie is the...
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Every December the online world is replete with Top 10 lists, reminding us of the year’s best sports plays, TV moments, and blockbuster movies. These articles have become so popular, in fact, that many outlets publish their Best of the Year pieces months before the end of the year. Which is awfully presumptive. Most troubling, though, is that many of these types of articles lack any real content – nothing truly amazing,...
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...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Just as your lifestyle can cause you to show your age, the same is true for star clusters, according to a study published in the journal Nature. Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have found that some globular clusters are still young at heart, despite being relics of the early Universe. Globular clusters are spherical collections of stars that are held tightly together by their mutual gravitational attraction. “Although...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Researchers reported in the journal Physical Review Letters that they have found a "glitch" in a 40-year-old theory explaining the periodic speeding up or "glitching" of pulsars. Pulsars emit a rotating beam of electromagnetic radiation, which can be detected by powerful telescopes once it sweeps past the Earth. The cosmic objects, which are highly magnetized rotating neutron stars formed from the remains of supernovae, rotate at...
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...
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...
Latest Universe 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...
Physics is a natural science involving the study of matter and its motion through space-time, along with related concepts such as energy and force. On a broader scale, it also involves the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves. Physics is one of the oldest academic disciplines, perhaps the oldest through its inclusion of astronomy. Physics was part of natural philosophy until the Scientific Revolution in the 16th century, when the natural...
Centaurus Constellation -- Centaurus (the centaur) was one of the 48 constellations listed by Ptolemy, and counts also among the 88 modern constellations. A constellation of the southern hemisphere, mentioned by Eudoxus (4th century B.C.) and Aratus (3rd century B.C.), Ptolemy catalogued thirty-seven stars in it. It contains Proxima Centauri, the red dwarf that is the nearest known star (other than the Sun) to Earth, as well as Alpha Centauri, which is a double star to which Proxima...
Large-Scale Structure of the Cosmos -- Stars are organised into galaxies which in turn appear to form clusters and superclusters, separated by voids. Prior to 1989 it was commonly assumed that the superclusters were the largest structures in existence, and that they were distributed more-or-less uniformly throughout the universe in every direction. However, in 1989, Margaret Geller and John Huchra discovered the "Great Wall", a sheet of galaxies more than 500 million light years long...
Cosmology -- area of science that aims at a comprehensive theory of the structure and evolution of the entire physical universe. Modern Cosmological Theories Present models of the universe hold two fundamental premises: the cosmological principle and the dominant role of gravitation. Derived by Hubble, the cosmological principle holds that if a large enough sample of galaxies is considered, the universe looks the same from all positions and in all directions in space. The second point...
