The early universe contained far fewer miniature black holes than previously thought, making the origins of our cosmos’s missing matter an even greater mystery, a new study has suggested. Miniature, or primordial, black holes (PBHs) are black holes thought to have formed in the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang. According to […]
A team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have discovered three of the oldest stars in the universe. To their surprise, the stars were not in some far off galaxy that only the ultra-powerful James Webb Space Telescope can spot. They are in our own galactic neighborhood inside the Milky Way’s “halo,” according to a study published May 14 in the […]
For the first time ever, astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) may have detected some of the earliest galaxies in the known universe in the midst of being born. In a new study, published Thursday (May 23) in the journal Science, the researchers report the detection of what appears to be three infant […]
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have found what they say are three of our universe’s earliest galaxies, spotted actively forming when the cosmos was just 400 million to 600 million years old. In the JWST’s images, this galactic trio resembles fuzzy red smudges feeding on nearby helium and hydrogen.Over millions of years, it […]
NASA’s forthcoming Nancy Grace Roman Telescope could use the grisly death of stars ripped apart by black holes to hunt the universe’s first population of stellar bodies. These early stars, referred to (somewhat confusingly) as Population III (Pop III) stars, were very different from the sun and other stars seen in the cosmos today. That’s […]
Scientists have made a major breakthrough that takes us a step closer to developing a nuclear clock — a device that keeps time based on the inner workings of atoms. For the first time, physicists have used laser light to bump the nucleus of a thorium atom up to a higher energy level. The discovery […]
Scientists may be a step closer to discovering how gamma-ray bursts come to be some of the most powerful explosions in the known universe. For context, a single gamma-ray burst, or GRB, can produce more energy in seconds than the sun will radiate in billions of years. Because of this power, scientists theorize that GRBs […]
The universe’s most extreme stars just got a little bit more unexpected and mysterious. Scientists were astounded when they witnessed a “dead” neutron star with one of the most powerful magnetic fields in the cosmos unexpectedly spring back to life. The reactivation of this highly magnetic neutron star or “magnetar” doesn’t conform to the current […]
First announced back in 2019 as an entirely new theme park within the sprawling Universal Orlando Resort campus in Florida, Universal Epic Universe will feature five elaborately imagined lands and a galaxy of thrill rides, shops and eateries when it opens its portals in 2025 — and we’ve got the recently released concept art to […]
In around 5 billion years, the sun will run out of the fuel needed for nuclear fusion in its core. This will cause its inner core to collapse under the force of the sun’s own gravity. At this point, the star’s outer layers (where nuclear fusion is still happening) will swell out, and it will […]
A swirling cluster of tiny orange masses grouped in two blobs. An enormous map of the universe has been assembled from the positions of almost 1.3 million quasars; some of these quasars existed just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. By comparing this new map with what’s known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB), […]
By measuring how energy waves wiggle in the sky over Earth, scientists have created a way to delve into the history of our 13.8 billion-year-old universe — starting right at its “first light.” The team, led by Johns Hopkins University astrophysicists, used an array of microwave telescopes called the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) to […]