The TV series “Star Trek” captured the public’s imagination with the signature phrase, “To boldly go where no one has gone before.” The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope doesn’t “boldly go” deep into space, but it is “boldly peering” deeper into the universe than ever before to explore the warping of space and time and uncover some of the farthest objects ever seen.
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.
About 250 million light-years away, there’s a neighbourhood of our universe that astronomers had considered quiet and unremarkable. But now, scientists have uncovered an enormous, bizarre galaxy possibly formed from the parts of other galaxies. Some 718,000 light-years across, UGC 1382 is more than seven times wider than the Milky Way.
Astronomers have discovered evidence for an unusual kind of black hole born extremely early in the universe. They showed that a recently discovered unusual source of intense radiation is likely powered by a “direct-collapse black hole,” a type of object predicted by theorists more than a decade ago.
Due for launch in 2020, ESA’s Euclid satellite will set astronomers a huge challenge: to analyse 100,000 strong gravitational lenses. The gravitational deflection of light from distant astronomical sources by interposing massive galaxies can create multiple images of the source that are not just visually stunning, but are also valuable tools for probing our universe.
Astronomers today (28 June) released spectacular new infrared images of the distant universe, providing the deepest view ever obtained over a large area of sky. The release of the Ultra-Deep Survey (UDS) represents the culmination of a project using the 3.8-metre United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) on Hawaii, building up more than 1,000 hours of exposure time.
A matter of scientific speculation since the 1930s, dark matter itself cannot yet be detected, but its gravitational effects can be. Now, eight scientists from Johns Hopkins University consider the possibility that the first black hole binary detected by LIGO could be part of this mysterious substance known to make up about 85 percent of the mass 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.
This unusual phenomenon, predicted by Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, was discovered by chance by doctoral student Margherita Bettinelli at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias while analysing images of the Sculptor dwarf galaxy. The “Canarias Einstein ring” is one of the most symmetrical discovered until now and is almost circular.
Dark matter is a mysterious substance composing most of the material universe, now widely thought to be some form of massive exotic particle. An intriguing alternative view is that dark matter is made of black holes formed during the first second of our universe’s existence, known as primordial black holes.
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