Tag Archives: Universe

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. The scientists who precisely measure the position of Earth are in a bit of trouble. Their measurements are essential for the satellites we use for navigation, communication and Earth observation every day. But you might be surprised to learn that …

Looking up at the night sky, it may seem our cosmic neighbourhood is packed full of planets, stars and galaxies. But scientists have long suggested there may be far fewer galaxies in our cosmic surroundings than expected. In fact, it appears we live in a giant cosmic void with roughly 20% lower than the average density of matter. Not every …

The frontrunner in this new space race is, of course, NASA. They’re the only organization to have even done it before in the first place, but that was 50 years ago. And while all the technology of the Apollo program still exists in the form of blueprints and designs, all the human expertise that went into crafting those rockets and …

Astronomers have long been puzzled by the forces that govern the movement of galaxies across vast stretches of space. A recent discovery, chronicled in a paper by scientists in 2014 (published in arxiv.org), deepens the mystery of a gravitational anomaly pulling over 400 galaxies, including the Milky Way, toward an unseen force. Known as the Great Attractor, this massive, invisible …

Most cosmologists agree that our universe had a beginning. But the finer details about the Big Bang remain a mystery. A history of everything would explain all, or so theoretical physicists hoped. In his final years, Stephen Hawking working with Thomas Hertog proposed a striking idea: The laws of physics were not precisely determined before the Big Bang; they evolved …

Tantalizing evidence hints that dark energy might be evolving, leading some cosmologists to suggest that our universe will collapse in a “Big Crunch” sooner than expected. Over the past year, massive surveys of galaxies by both the Dark Energy Survey (DES) and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) have revealed that dark energy — the mysterious force that’s accelerating the …

The regular matter that makes us, planets, stars, and galaxies is about 5 percent of the matter-energy content of the universe. The rest is made of dark matter and dark energy, though we are not sure what they are. There is also uncertainty around the regular matter, since for a long time over one-third of it was not accounted for. …

This image is a simulation based on groundbreaking new images captured by an international team of astronomers. The team detected the very faint glow from the gas inside cosmic filaments, shown here in white. Where these filaments intersect, the gas inside galaxies, which helps create new stars, is shown in red/orange. | Credit: © Alejandro Benitez-Llambay/Universität Mailand-Bicocca/MPA An international team …

When the JWST began science observations in July 2022, it flung open a whole new window on the Universe. The JWST looked further back in time than any other telescope, and it revealed several surprises. One of them was the Little Red Dots (LRD); ancient, faint objects that the powerful space telescope detected as far back as only 600 million …

Following the Big Bang, our universe expanded at an exponential rate. According to this theory, known as cosmic inflation, the explosive growth produced tiny quantum fluctuations that later evolved into galaxies. Cosmic inflation neatly explains how our universe got so large and mostly homogenous, and that’s why it’s remained a strong theory in cosmology for decades. But it’s far from …