A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is investing heavily in genetic engineering and synthetic biology, that could excite or terrify you depending on how you feel about the military engineering totally new life forms. Continue reading… “DARPA says they are engineering the organisms that will teraform Mars”
Photographer Alex Cherney has dedicated his life’s work to capturing the night sky.
A star-gazer with just an ordinary digital camera has come a little bit closer to the final frontier. – Alex Cherney spent 18 months photographing the night sky and turned thousands of snaps into incredible time-lapse video of the cosmos. (Pics)
Continue reading… “Breathtaking photos of the night sky seen with the naked eye”
‘Missing’ stars in the Andromeda Nebula and our Milky Way?
In the local group of galaxies that also includes the Andromeda Nebula and our Milky Way, there are about 100 billion stars. According to astronomers’ calculations, there should be many more. Now, physicists from the University of Bonn and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland may have found an explanation for this discrepancy.
Continue reading… “Enigma of Missing Stars in Local Group of Galaxies”
This planet of extragalactic origin was detected by a European team of astronomers
Over the last 15 years, astronomers have detected nearly 500 planets orbiting stars in our cosmic neighbourhood, but none outside our Milky Way has been confirmed.
Continue reading… “Planet from Another Galaxy Discovered!!!”
A “Ghostly” image for those undead terrestrials
While sorting through hundreds of galaxy images as part of the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project two years ago, Dutch schoolteacher and volunteer astronomer Hanny van Arkel stumbled upon a strange-looking object that baffled professional astronomers. Two years later, a team led by Yale University researchers has discovered that the unique object represents a snapshot in time that reveals surprising clues about the life cycle of black holes. Continue reading… “Cosmic Curiosity Reveals Ghostly Glow of Dead Quasar”
If only we could get close to it without being crushed…
A gamma-ray burst is an immensely powerful blast of high-energy light thought to be generated by a collapsing star in a distant galaxy, but what this collapse leaves behind has been a matter of debate.
Continue reading… “Black Holes May Be A Power Source”
A group of international astronomers in the UK, France and the USA, led by the University of Leicester, have found proof to confirm the distance and brightness of the most extreme ultra-luminous X-ray source, which may herald a new type of Black Hole.
Continue reading… “Extreme X-Ray Source Suggests New Class of Black Hole”
Supermassive black holes found at the centers of distant galaxies undergo huge growth spurts as a result of galactic collisions, according to a new study by astronomers at Yale University and the University of Hawaii.
Astronomers have come across what appear to be two of the earliest and most primitive supermassive black holes known. The discovery, based largely on observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, will provide a better understanding of the roots of our universe, and how the very first black holes, galaxies and stars all came to be.
Continue reading… “Astronomers Discover Most Primitive Supermassive Black Holes Known”
A new infrared image from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, shows a cosmic rosebud blossoming with new stars. The stars, called the Berkeley 59 cluster, are the blue dots to the right of the image center. They are ripening out of the dust cloud from which they formed, and at just a few million years old, are young on stellar time scales.
Continue reading… “WISE Captures a Cosmic Rosebud Blossoming With New Stars”
An international team of scientists, including several who are affiliated with UC Santa Barbara, has discovered a new planet the size of Jupiter. The finding is published in the March 18 issue of the journal Nature.
Continue reading… “First Temperate Exoplanet — Size of Jupiter — Discovered”
Giant filaments of cold dust stretching through our Galaxy are revealed in a new image from ESA’s Planck satellite. Analysing these structures could help to determine the forces that shape our Galaxy and trigger star formation.
Continue reading… “Cosmic Tapestry: Giant Filaments of Cold Dust Stretch Through Milky Way”
