Tagged: universe

Quasars are very bright, distant and active supermassive black holes that are millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun. Typically located at the centers of galaxies, they feed on infalling matter and unleash fantastic torrents of radiation. Among the brightest objects in...

Our universe is expanding, but our two main ways to measure how fast this expansion is happening have resulted in different answers. For the past decade, astrophysicists have been gradually dividing into two camps: one that believes that the difference is significant, and another that...

Cosmic dawn, when stars formed for the first time, occurred 250 million to 350 million years after the beginning of the universe, according to a new study led by researchers at University College London (UCL) and the University of Cambridge. The study, published in the...

Submillimeter galaxies (SMGs) are a class of the most luminous, distant, and rapidly star-forming galaxies known and can shine brighter than a trillion Suns (about one hundred times more luminous in total than the Milky Way). They are generally hard to detect in the visible,...

Astronomers are on the search for a mysterious signal that could map the early universe. Astronomers are on the search for a mysterious signal. This signal could chart the universe’s first stars and tell us how existence took shape. Light travels nearly 300,000 kilometers per...

Japanese astronomers have developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) technique to remove noise in astronomical data due to random variations in galaxy shapes. After extensive training and testing on large mock data created by supercomputer simulations, they then applied this new tool to actual data...

By Lloyd Strickland, Manchester Metropolitan University. Originally published November 11, 2016, in The Conversation. In an ideal world, every extraordinary philosophical question would come with an extraordinary story telling the tale of how someone first thought of it. Unfortunately, we can only guess at what...

How is matter distributed within our universe? And what is the mysterious substance known as dark energy made of? HIRAX, a new large telescope array comprising hundreds of small radio telescopes, should provide some answers. Among those instrumental in developing the system are physicists from...

Cosmologists have produced the biggest map yet of the Universe’s structure, and found that matter might be spread more evenly than previously thought. The results, part of the ongoing Dark Energy Survey (DES), chart the distribution of matter in part by measuring how mass bends...

In 29 new scientific papers, the Dark Energy Survey examines the largest-ever maps of galaxy distribution and shapes, extending more than 7 billion light-years across the universe. The extraordinarily precise analysis, which includes data from the survey’s first three years, contributes to the most powerful...