Scientific American

If the Universe Is Expanding, Why Are the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxies on a Collision Course? [Video]

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 15:51:00 EST

Questions answered in this episode:

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New Physics Complications Lend Support to Multiverse Hypothesis

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 08:00:00 EST

From Simons Science News ( find original story here )

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Faint Portraits of First Galaxies Shed Light on Cosmic Dawn

Wed, 29 May 2013 17:00:00 EST

For one sleepless week in early September 2009, Garth Illingworth and his team had the early Universe all to themselves. At NASA's request, Illingworth, Rychard Bouwens and Pascal Oesch had just spent the previous week staring into their computer screens at the University of California, Santa Cruz, scanning through hundreds of black-and-white portraits of faint galaxies recorded in a multi-day time exposure by a newly installed infrared camera on the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA simply wanted the three astronomers to preview the images and make sure that the camera was working correctly, before the agency released the data more widely.

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Summer Blockbuster: A Black Hole Swallows a Cloud

Thu, 23 May 2013 07:00:00 EST

Astronomers have seen it coming. Starting this summer--possibly this month--a large cloud of gas and dust and perhaps a star will begin to ricochet through the dead center of the Milky Way galaxy, the home of a supermassive black hole. The ensuing celestial fireworks should reveal much about the mysterious central core of the galaxy, a region kept shrouded in darkness by dust and distance.

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Antarctic Neutrino Observatory Detects Unexplained High-Energy Particles

Sat, 18 May 2013 07:00:00 EST

Hot on the heels of detecting the two highest-energy neutrinos ever observed, scientists working with a mammoth particle detector buried in ice near the South Pole unveiled preliminary data showing that they also registered the signal of 26 additional high-energy neutrinos. The newfound neutrinos are somewhat less energetic than the two record-setters but nonetheless appear to carry more energy than would be expected if created by cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere--a prodigious source of neutrinos raining down on Earth. The particles thus may point to unknown energetic astrophysical processes deeper in the cosmos .

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Saturn Is Shaking Its Rings

Mon, 13 May 2013 16:55:00 EST

Saturn's rings are such a spectacle that you can see them through even a modest telescope. Made mostly of water ice, the rings contain countless particles, large and small, that orbit the planet in a thin plane. For decades scientists have known that gravitational tugs from Saturn's many moons imprint patterns on the rings. Now they have discovered a new ring sculptor: oscillations of the planet itself, which promise insight into the interior of the solar system’s second-largest planet.

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A New NASA Mission Propels Detailed Investigations of Nearby Exoplanets

Thu, 02 May 2013 02:00:00 EST

NASA's Kepler mission has been a smash hit. It has discovered thousands of probable exoplanets--worlds orbiting stars other than the sun--more than 100 of which have already been vetted and confirmed. Many of those planets are among the most nearly Earth-size planets known: of the 25 smallest-diameter exoplanets discovered to date, all but one were spotted by Kepler. There is just one asterisk tacked to Kepler's immensely productive haul: the planets are hundreds or even thousands of light-years away, too distant to investigate in any detail.

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Astronomers Discover New Neighbor Galaxy to the Milky Way

Wed, 01 May 2013 09:20:00 EST

In recent years astronomers have extended their view almost to the very edge of the observable universe. With the venerable Hubble Space Telescope researchers have spotted a handful of galaxies so faraway that we see them as they appeared just 400 million years or so after the big bang.

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"Way Too Bright" Supernova Eludes Astronomers

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 11:00:00 EST

All supernovae are bright. When a star ends its life in a cataclysmic explosion, it emits a burst of energy and light that can outshine the rest of the galaxy in which it resides. But some supernovae are a little too bright --at least from the standpoint of the researchers trying to figure out what caused them.

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Dark Matter Signals Recorded in Minnesota Mine

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 10:00:00 EST

More hints of dark matter have emerged from the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS), which hunts for the theorized particles from the depths of a mine in Minnesota.

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Dark Matter Signal Possibly Registered on International Space Station

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 18:00:00 EST

A $2-billion particle detector mounted on the International Space Station has registered an excess of antimatter particles in space, the experiment’s lead scientist announced April 3. That excess could come from fast-spinning stellar remnants known as pulsars and other exotic, but visible sources within the Milky Way galaxy. Or the antiparticles might have originated from the long-sought dark matter, the hypothetical massive particles that constitute some 27 percent of the universe.

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If Photons Have Zero Mass, How Can Black Holes Pull Them In? [Video]

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 00:00:00 EST

Questions answered in this episode:

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How the Higgs Boson Might Spell Doom for the Universe

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 07:00:00 EST

Physicists recently confirmed that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the particle physics laboratory in Geneva, had indeed found a Higgs boson last July, marking a culmination of one of the longest and most expensive searches in science. The finding also means that our universe could be doomed to fall apart. "If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it is bad news," says Joseph Lykken, a theorist who works at the Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. "It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable."

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Universe May Be a Titch Older

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 15:40:08 EST

Our universe has long passed for a 13.7-billion-year-old, but it turns out it’s really a bit more elderly. So says new data from the European Planck satellite.

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Thinkers Talk about Nothing

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 13:33:08 EST

Nothing was on the table at the annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate March 20th at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Here’s Hayden Planetarium Director Neil deGrasse Tyson talking with journalist Jim Holt, author of Why Does the World Exist , and physicist Lawrence Krauss, author of A Universe from Nothing .

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New View of Primordial Universe Confirms Sudden "Inflation" after Big Bang

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 13:19:00 EST

The Planck space telescope has delivered the most detailed picture yet of the cosmic microwave background, the residual glow of the Big Bang.

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Unfinished Chile Observatory Makes Starry Discovery

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 18:37:08 EST

Billions of years ago the universe was a star-forming machine. Some galaxies were churning out a star every few hours. But today the Milky Way produces maybe a couple of stars annually. Now a study shows that the busy period of star formation was in full swing earlier than had been thought.

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Nearby Star Came In with the Bang

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 15:25:08 EST

There's an old-timer in the neighborhood, and it's got a story to tell. A new study of a relatively nearby old star shows that it’s almost as old as the big bang itself.

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Fly into the Depths of the Orion Nebula

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 12:00:00 EST

In the constellation of Orion, just south of Orion's "belt," lies a diffuse cloud of dust and gas that's one of the brightest and best-studied stellar nurseries in the night sky. On a clear night you can see the Orion Nebula with the naked eye--but this 50-second animation, based on data from the Hubble Space Telescope, actually goes inside the nebula to show in vivid colors the young stars and protoplanets forming amidst the gas clouds as well as the massive Trapezium stars whose ionizing radiation is burning the clouds away. All stars form in clusters like the one near the Orion Nebula, but until recently the structure and evolution of these clusters received little scientific attention. "The Inner Life of Star Clusters" details the latest thinking on the various types of stellar groups.

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Theory Explains How Star Clusters Form and Evolve (preview)

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 07:02:00 EST

The night sky is a field of stars. In every direction, stars bright and dim fill the horizon to brimming. Some seem to form distinct patterns, which we recognize as constellations. Yet as beguiling as those patterns may be, most of them are no more than projections of the human mind. The vast majority of stars, in our own galaxy and in others, have no true physical connection to one another.

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