Category: Cosmology

Our galaxy is not alone. Swirling around the Milky Way are several smaller, dwarf galaxies — the biggest of which are the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, visible in the night sky of the Southern Hemisphere. During their dance around the Milky Way over billions of years, the Magellanic Clouds’ gravity has ripped from each…

Scientists say 35 novel discoveries included a pair of massive black holes 145 times as heavy as the sun orbiting each other. Astronomers have detected a record number of gravitational waves, in a discovery they say will shed light on the evolution of the universe, and the life and death of stars. An international team…

An updated search for primordial gravitational waves has not found a signal, which implies that some popular early Universe models are becoming less viable. Remarkably, the large-scale Universe can be adequately described by a model involving only a handful of parameters. This lambda cold dark matter (LCDM) model postulates that the expansion of the Universe…

The Event Horizon Telescope is expanding its portfolio of black hole images. In 2019, the telescope unveiled the first image of a black hole, revealing the supermassive beast 55 light-years from Earth at the center of galaxy M87 (SN: 4/10/19). That lopsided orange ring showed the shadow of the black hole on its glowing accretion disk…

Experiment opens up field for new physics, say Fermilab, UChicago scientistsThe news that muons have a little extra wiggle in their step sent word buzzing around the world this spring. The Muon g-2 experiment hosted at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced April 7 that they had measured a particle called a muon behaving slightly differently…

There are certain rules that even the most extreme objects in the universe must obey. A central law for black holes predicts that the area of their event horizons — the boundary beyond which nothing can ever escape — should never shrink. This law is Hawking’s area theorem, named after physicist Stephen Hawking, who derived…

The Search for Dark Matter Is Dramatically Expanding The Search for Dark Matter Is Dramatically Expanding Physicists are checking whether dark matter tickles different types of detectors, nudges starlight, warms planetary cores, or even lodges in rocks. EVER SINCE ASTRONOMERS reached a consensus in the 1980s that most of the mass in the universe is invisible—that…

For as long as there has been a Universe, space has been expanding. It winked into existence roughly 13.8 billion years ago, and has been puffing up ever since, like a giant cosmic balloon. Source: www.sciencealert.com/we-can-t-figure-out-how-fast-the-universe-is-expanding-here-s-why/