News

What happened after the lights came on in the universe?

The National Science Foundation has approved funding to expand the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionisation Array (HERA) in South Africa. Upgrading the number of antennas from 19 to 240 by the year 2018 will enable HERA to study more clearly the impact of cosmic dawn, the moment a few hundred million years after the Big Bang when the first stars and galaxies blazed awake.

News

Study explains why galaxies stop creating stars

The processes that cause galaxies to cease star formation are not well understood and constitute an outstanding problem in the study of the evolution of elliptical, spiral (such as the Milky Way) and irregular galaxies. Now, using a large sample of around 70,000 galaxies, a team of researchers may have an explanation for why some stop creating stars.

News

ALMA detects most distant signs of oxygen in the universe

An international team of astronomers has used the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) to detect glowing oxygen in a distant galaxy seen just 700 million years after the Big Bang. This is the most distant galaxy in which oxygen has ever been unambiguously detected, and it is most likely being ionised by powerful radiation from young giant stars.

Picture This

A mysterious solitary galaxy in Ursa Major

The drizzle of stars scattered across this image forms an irregular dwarf galaxy known as UGC 4879. Some 2.3 million light-years from its closest neighbour, UGC 4879’s isolation means that it has not interacted with any surrounding galaxies, making it an ideal laboratory for astronomers looking to understand the complex mysteries of starbirth throughout the universe.

News

Hubble finds universe is expanding faster than expected

When Edwin Hubble discovered nearly 100 years ago that the universe was uniformly expanding in all directions, the finding was a big surprise. Then, in the mid-1990s, another shocker occurred: astronomers found that the expansion rate was accelerating, perhaps due to “dark energy.” Now, the latest measurements of our runaway universe suggest that it is expanding faster than astronomers thought.