Technical problems discovered during ground testing of U.S.-built detectors for the European Space Agency’s Euclid astronomy mission will delay the completion of the telescope’s scientific payload, jeopardising the observatory’s 2020 launch target, the head of NASA’s astrophysics division said last week.
NASA managers say the WFIRST mission, the next in the agency’s line of powerful observatories after the Hubble and James Webb telescopes, could cost around $3.2 billion after budgeting for a novel first-of-its-kind instrument to probe the make-up of planets around nearby stars and a bigger-than-expected launch vehicle.
Emergent gravity is a new theory that might explain the curious motions of stars in galaxies. It predicts the exact same deviation of motions that is usually explained by invoking dark matter. Professor Erik Verlinde, renowned expert in string theory, publishes a new research paper today in which he expands his groundbreaking views on the nature of gravity.
Five years ago, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three astronomers for their discovery, in the late 1990s, that the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace. Now, a team of scientists led by Professor Subir Sarkar of Oxford University’s Department of Physics has cast doubt on this standard cosmological concept.
Researchers who are looking for new ways to probe the nature of gravity and dark energy in the universe have adopted a new strategy: looking at what’s not there. An international team of astronomers were able to achieve four times better precision in measurements of how the universe’s visible matter is clustered together by studying the empty spaces in between.
Hundreds of scientists from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) collaborated to make the largest-ever, three-dimensional map of distant galaxies. The astronomers then used this map to make one of the most precise measurements yet of the dark energy currently driving the accelerated expansion of the universe.
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.
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