Detailing their work in Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team of scientists suggest there may be far fewer galaxies in the far reaches of the Universe than previously thought. Led by Brian O’Shea, from Michigan State University, the team offer a theory that reduces the estimated number of the most distant galaxies by 10 to 100 […]
Using data from NASA’s WISE orbiting observatory, a team of scientists say they have found no evidence of the mid-infrared energy emissions we would expect to observe from other advanced civilizations. The research is a significant expansion of earlier work in this area, which looked at only 100 or so galaxies. “The idea behind our […]
Astrophysicists have discovered an entire star cluster that has been ejected from the galaxy known as M87 at more than two million miles per hour. The newly discovered cluster, which astronomers named HVGC-1, will now travel forever through intergalactic space. “Astronomers have found runaway starsbefore, but this is the first time we’ve found a runaway […]
Astronomers have discovered dozens of solitary stars that are moving fast enough to escape the gravitational grasp of the Milky Way galaxy. These cryptic hypervelocity stars appear to be traveling at speeds in excess of a million miles-per-hour, but scientists aren’t sure what force could have given them such a kick. An article describing these […]
Newly discovered galaxy z8-GND-5296 is providing astronomers with an intriguing glimpse of what the universe was like when it was only about 700 million years old – 13.1 billion years ago. Detailing their work in the journal Nature, the astronomers explain how the discovery was made possible by a new instrument, MOSFIRE, commissioned on the […]
Astronomers have found the most distant gravitational lens yet – a galaxy that (as predicted by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity) deflects and intensifies the light of an even more distant object. However, the discovery poses a mystery: lenses of this kind should be exceedingly rare, so astronomers either have been phenomenally lucky in […]
The discovery of two new components within a puzzling spiral galaxy confirm it must have a pair of arms winding in the opposite direction than that of most other galaxies, according to a study published in the Astronomical Journal. “While the existence of a galaxy with a pair of ‘backward’ arms may seem like an […]
Scientists from the University of Cambridge and the University of Exeter are suggesting that the evolution of the early Universe was much slower than previously thought. Doctor Andrew Bunker has been studying images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of what is called Hubble’s Ultra Deep Field (HUDF). Images from HUDF provide mankind’s deepest optical […]
