Category: Cosmology

A team of astronomers including those from the University of Tokyo have created the first-ever map of magnetic field structures within a spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy. Previous studies on galactic magnetic fields only gave a very general picture, but the new study reveals that magnetic fields in the spiral arms of our…

Is this the faintest galaxy ever found? 350 unique galaxies were studied for this survey, and astronomers used several major radio telescopes around the world, including the National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Telescope, the Arecibo Telescope, and the Nançay Radio Telescope. “The goal was to determine the gas and dynamic masses of these ultra-diffuse galaxies.…

The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), a hazy blob in the night sky easily visible to people in the Southern Hemisphere, has long been considered a lone dwarf galaxy close to the Milky Way. But a study posted online this month, and accepted by The Astronomical Journal, suggests the familiar site is not a single body,…

Mysterious New Signals Detected by SETI: Unlocking the Strange Puzzle of Fast Radio Bursts This work proves that new telescopes with unique capabilities, like the ATA, can provide a new angle on outstanding mysteries in FRB science. A team of SETI Institute scientists have unveiled new insights into a cosmic mystery known as Fast Radio…

The top regulatory agency for nuclear materials safety in the U.S. voted unanimously to regulate the burgeoning fusion industry differently than the nuclear fission industry, and fusion startups are celebrating that as a major win. As a result, some provisions specific to fission reactors, like requiring funding to cover claims from nuclear meltdowns, won’t apply to fusion plants. (Fusion…

Amazing to see a metal-rich galaxy so early in the Universe’s history. Scanning the first images of a well-known early galaxy taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Cornell astronomers were intrigued to see a blob of light near its outer edge. More here

Astronomers say they have solved an outstanding problem that challenged our understanding of how the universe evolved—the spatial distribution of faint satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. These satellite galaxies exhibit a bizarre alignment—they seem to lie on an enormous thin rotating plane—called the “plane of satellites.” This seemingly unlikely arrangement had puzzled astronomers for…

Two new studies suggest that certain tetrahedral arrangements of galaxies outnumber their mirror images, potentially reflecting details of the universe’s birth. But confirmation is needed. Physicists believe they have detected a striking asymmetry in the arrangements of galaxies in the sky. If confirmed, the finding would point to features of the unknown fundamental laws that…

Why haven’t we found wormholes? It might be because they look just like blackholes! A group of researchers at Sofia University has found evidence that suggests the reason that a wormhole has never been observed is that they appear almost identical to black holes. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review D, , Petya Nedkova,…

With new algorithms and supercomputers, an incredibly detailed radio map of the universe has been created. Now astronomers can look at radio data of galaxies with much more precision. This research was published in Nature Astronomy by Leiden University Ph.D. student Frits Sweijen and colleagues. “This single map has almost as many pixels as previous maps of…

The South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) has released today a new MeerKAT telescope image of the centre of our Galaxy, showing radio emission from the region with unprecedented clarity and depth. The international team behind the work is publishing the initial science highlights from this image in The Astrophysical Journal. The article is accompanied by…