A few years ago, researchers revealed that the universe is expanding at a much faster rate than originally believed — a discovery that earned a Nobel Prize in 2011. But measuring the rate of this acceleration over large distances is still challenging and problematic, says Prof. Hagai Netzer of Tel Aviv University's School of Physics and Astronomy.
An international team of scientists has discovered a planetary system 1,200 light-years away that hosts two super-Earth-sized planets in its “habitable zone” — a region in which conditions are favorable for a planet’s surface to hold liquid water, and potentially life.
This year marks the 23rd year of observing for the Hubble Space Telescope. Alongside cutting-edge science, the orbiting observatory has produced countless stunning astronomical images. Some of the most striking and beautiful subjects of Hubble's images have been nebulae -- vast interstellar clouds of gas and dust.
A stark black-and-white photo of an access tunnel 1,500 meters underground at the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics' Gran Sasso National Laboratory and a colorful close-up of a detector at INFN's Frascati National Laboratory that wouldn't be out of place in a building by Antoni Gaudi have won the top prizes in the second Global Particle Physics Photowalk.
Astronomers have used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to photograph the iconic Horsehead Nebula in a new, infrared light to mark the 23rd anniversary of the famous observatory's launch aboard the space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990.
University of Chicago researchers have created a synthetic compound that mimics the complex quantum dynamics observed in photosynthesis and may enable fundamentally new routes to creating solar-energy technologies. Engineering quantum effects into synthetic light-harvesting devices is not only possible, but also easier than anyone expected, the researchers report in the April 19 edition of Science.
A University of Washington astronomer has discovered perhaps the most Earthlike planet yet found outside the solar system by the Kepler Space Telescope.
NASA's Kepler mission has discovered two new planetary systems that include three super-Earth-size planets in the "habitable zone," the range of distance from a star where the surface temperature of an orbiting planet might be suitable for liquid water.
A Cornell researcher and his team have uncovered an oddity in the early cosmos: A newly discovered distant galaxy, born just after the big bang, is starting to furiously churn out stars at peak capacity – despite its young age.
Blazars are the brightest of active galactic nuclei, and many emit very high-energy gamma rays. New observations of the blazar known as PKS 1424+240 show that it is the most distant known source of very high-energy gamma rays, but its emission spectrum now appears highly unusual in light of the new data.
In the bizarre world of quantum physics, objects can be in more than one place at a time and future events can change the past. New research involving a Texas A&M University professor makes that microscopic realm even a bit stranger.
Astronomers using a world-wide collection of telescopes have discovered the most prolific star factory in the Universe, surprisingly in a galaxy so distant that they see as it was when the Universe was only six percent of its current age.
This year, astronomers around the world have been celebrating the 50th anniversary of X-ray astronomy. Few objects better illustrate the progress of the field in the past half-century than the supernova remnant known as SN 1006.
Such is often the case for galaxies, at least: the first galaxies were small, then eventually merged together to form the behemoths we see in the present universe.
By Marcus Woo
18 Apr 2013
A team of astronomers has used the new ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) telescope to pinpoint the locations of over 100 of the most fertile star-forming galaxies in the early Universe. ALMA is so powerful that, in just a few hours, it captured as many observations of these galaxies as have been made by all similar telescopes worldwide over a span of more than a decade.