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…
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.
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…
While HST’s successor is named after the architect of the revolutionary Apollo Moon missions, an obvious tribute to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s second administrator, James E. Webb, the name given is perhaps also symbolic of the aspirations of all those involved in the project, that with the telescope’s Read more…
Students in Northern Ireland hoping for careers in the exciting and increasingly important space sector now can pursue a course targeting their needs. The Council for the Curriculum Examinations & Assessment’s new QCF Level 2 Space Science Technology qualification has been accredited by Ofqual and is available for first teaching Read more…
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…
Looking up in to the night sky it’s not difficult to see why the ancient Greeks believed that all the stars in the night sky were fixed on a celestial sphere revolving around the Earth and other planets. From our view on Earth the stars appear to be at a 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…
Green Lantern has for decades guarded Earth and beyond from evil in the pages of comic books but the cosmic superhero is about to face his greatest challenge: can he make it on the big screen? Tracy McConnell reports on the science of Green Lantern. In brightest day, in blackest Read more…
Gleaned from NASA and Hubblesite.org, here are some facts you may not know about the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). 1. The HST’s history is longer than you might have thought, going back to just after World War II. In 1946, the astronomer Lyman Spitzer (1914-97) identified the main advantages 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…