The eROSITA telescope has provided a new, sharp view of hot and energetic processes across the Universe. The eROSITA X-ray telescope has completed its first full sweep of the sky. This new map of the hot, energetic universe contains more than one million objects, roughly doubling the number of known Read more…
To kick off our new weekly series on the Technical Applications of Astronomy to Society, inspired by a recent publication of the IAU (The International Astronomical Union), our Director Michael Burton has written a brief summary of the history and purpose of the IAU, as well as outlining some of Read more…
Before addressing Black Hole sizes, we should first go back to see what astronomers mean when they use the term “Black Hole”. This may be easiest to understand when considering the end products of stars.
As had been reported on in an earlier Astronotes blog article, the International Astronomical Union was putting to the vote whether to change the name of the law relating to the expansion of the universe. Of the 11,000 professional astronomers entitled to vote on the motion, over 4,000 did. The Read more…
As an earlier Astronotes article reported on, during its XXX General Assembly in Vienna, held in August 2018, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) put forward a draft resolution to rename the Hubble law as the “Hubble–Lemaître law”. The resolution was proposed to recognise Lemaître’s research on the expansion of the Universe, and to pay tribute to both Lemaître and Hubble for their fundamental contributions to the development of modern cosmology.
After a special vote in the IAu General Assembly, we interview Armagh Observatory and Planetarium Director. Professor MIchael Burton, on the renaming of the Hubble Law.
No one undertakes research in physics with the intention of winning a prize. It is the joy of discovering something no one knew before. – Professor Stephen Hawking Today, 14th March 2018, marks a very sad day in the world of physics and the world in general. One of Read more…
On October 31, 2017, the world will celebrate the international hunt for dark matter. Armagh Observatory and Planetarium will be having a special showing of the “Phantom of the Universe” at 2pm, a Full Dome show which discusses our understanding (or lack thereof) Dark Matter, and the search to find Read more…
Over the past few weeks I have been hearing the term “The Big Bounce Theory,” quite a lot. At first I thought it was a sequel to the brilliant “The Big Bang Theory” TV show. When listening to the “Star Talk,” podcast by Neil De Grasse Tyson however Read more…
“How could the Universe we see around us be created by an explosion?” This is a question often asked by those puzzled by the scientific consensus, the standard model of cosmology, which tells of our entire Universe bursting forth in a single dramatic event, the Big Bang. Modern thinking suggests Read more…
Ever had a frustrating morning and wished you could ‘Hulk-out’ or that some superhuman abilities were within your grasp even for the briefest of moments?With the psyche of superheroes very much to the fore in contemporary culture, it is perhaps interesting to learn that emissions similar to those of human Read more…
The Universe is 13.75 billion years old.It is easy to say, but what does that mean in Earthly terms?Let’s squeeze the whole history of the Universe into a year! Just to clear, we’re putting things into perspective by compressing the Universe’s whole 13.75 billion years since the Big Bang Read more…
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is just one of an enormous number of galaxies spread throughout a vast Universe, which is expanding.Everyone knows these facts now, but how do we actually know about our place in the Universe? Light travels through space as a wave, and hence light has Read more…
A long, long time ago when the first stars and galaxies were forming, the Universe was filled with electrically neutral hydrogen. This thin soup of gas absorbed ultraviolet light and all of space would have seemed filled with softly glowing fog. The light of the first generation of stars was Read more…
In more than twenty years of hard work, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has made both beautiful images and profound discoveries, sometimes doing both at the same time. What are its greatest contributions to science? Hubble has enabled us to estimate just how big and how old the universe is Read more…
Neutrinos travel faster than light! The science world is agog at this unexpected announcement from CERN in Switzerland. This result has to be verified, for if true it seems that one of science’s central tenets is wrong! It’s all Einstein’s fault of course. Albert Einstein (1879-1955) came up with Read more…
Time is among the most mysterious of fundamental quantities. Time was originally defined and quantified through astronomy, and today astronomers are used to glibly talking of vast stretches of time. But even after Einstein showed time to be an elastic, changing thing we still have to resolve all its mysteries. Read more…
Galaxies, distant from us in space and time, have been in the news recently. Astronomers knew that far away galaxies (and hence ancient galaxies)were smaller than those galaxies closer (in time and space) to us today in the Milky Way. It was believed that the first galaxies appeared less than Read more…
In, say 1975, there was only one kind of ‘stuff’ in the Universe, matter made of protons and neutrons. By 1985 there was a consensus that this was not enough, the gravity of the stars in galaxies was not sufficient to hold them together. Something else was there, vast, mysterious Read more…
We all love bright and showy spiral galaxies! So much so, that we tend to overlook the elliptical galaxies which make up about 30% of the galaxies out there. Smaller than spiral galaxies, elliptical galaxies may be full of stellar living fossils, surviving virtually unchanged from an older cosmic era. Read more…
Here’s how rainbows are made. Some 13.7 billion years ago, a mere millionth of a second after the Big Bang, the first hydrogen and helium nuclei condensed out of a hot, dense soup of quarks and gluons. It took another 380 000 years or so for conditions in the ancient Read more…
Dark matter and its part in the evolution of the Universe is revealed by new data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope. This image could be taken for a lurid TV special effect (the Lights of Zetar perhaps?) but it may actually represent proof of that elusive and mysterious entity, Read more…