Have you ever been worried about the impact of an asteroid wiping out human life? Well, I have some disturbing news for you: there is another possibility involving the explosion of a massive star that gives rise to a gamma-ray burst (called by astronomers simply a GRB), when the star ends its life producing a black hole.
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.
Our Solar System is old. Our best estimates from radiometric dating of meteorites suggest the Sun and its planets (including Earth) were forming some 4.6 billion years ago. The Universe itself appears to be some 13.8 billion years old based on its observed rate of expansion and the properties of Read more…
Have you ever wished you could hop into a time machine, zip back billions of years and answer one of the age old questions that have plagued mankind from the first time someone peered up into the night sky? To know what exactly happened in the universe that created the 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…
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…
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…