Black holes that wander

Supermassive black holes that have escaped their host galaxies may be wandering the universe alone. Intriguing new observations i by NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope have | revealed what appears to be a supermassive | black hole being “kicked out of a galaxy at enormous speed,” Francesca Civano of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics tells Space.com. Astronomers observed two distinct light […]

Read more

Russia has plans to nuke Earth-bound asteroids, if necessary

From 2012 to 2015, Russia researched ways of deflecting Earth-bound asteroids using nuclear weapons and came up with a best-case scenario. The Central Scientific Research Institute of Machine Building, an arm of Russia’s state-run Roscosmos space agency, worked on the asteroid problem with other countries (including the United States) in a program called NEOShield, which was largely funded by the […]

Read more

A monster black hole

An international team of astronomers has detected a colossal black hole that is 12 billion times more massive than the sun—so big that it is challenging accepted cosmological thinking. Scientists discovered the enormous celestial body, which is 12.8 billion light-years from Earth, at the center of a brilliantly glowing quasar, a cloud of gas that gets superheated and gives off […]

Read more

Relics of the big bang

Astronomers have discovered two clouds of gas some 12 billion light-years away that appear to preserve the primordial conditions of the universe in the minutes after the big bang. The clouds contain just hydrogen and its isotope deuterium, making them “the first examples to fit precisely” into what scientists think the early universe was like, University of California astronomer Jason […]

Read more

Mysterious signal from deep space

Mysterious signal from deep space

Mysterious radio signals from space have been known to repeat, but for the first time, researchers have noticed a pattern in a series of bursts coming from a single source half a billion light-years from Earth. Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are millisecond-long bursts of radio waves in space. Individual radio bursts emit once and don’t repeat. But repeating fast […]

Read more

Finding the Higgs boson

Forty-eight years after British physicist Peter Higgs predicted its existence, the Higgs boson was finally spotted by scientists at the CERN lab in Geneva.The “God particle” explains the existence of mass and backs up the Standard Model, the foundational theory of modern physics. “For physicists, this is the equivalent of Columbus discovering America,” says physicist Themis Bowcock. The Higgs is […]

Read more
1 4 5 6