Tag: The Universe

Why Peter Higgs leaves a massive legacy in the field of physics

NeRD

On April 8, 2024, British theoretical physicist Peter Ware Higgs passed away at the age of 94. It was almost 12 years ago, on July 4, 2012, in a fairly inauspicious lecture hall located in Geneva, Switzerland, when Higgs became an iconic figure in modern science. That was the day it was announced that collisions between particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) facility — arguably the most ambitious and audacious science experiment ever — revealed the existence of the Higgs Boson. The discovery of the Higgs boson, named for…

Read More

Hubble Peers at Pair of Closely Interacting Galaxies

NeRD

2 min read Hubble Peers at Pair of Closely Interacting Galaxies This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features Arp 72. ESA/Hubble & NASA, L. Galbany, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features Arp 72, a very selective galaxy group that only includes two galaxies interacting due to gravity: NGC 5996 (the large spiral galaxy) and NGC 5994 (its smaller companion, in the lower left of the image). Both galaxies lie approximately 160 million light-years from Earth, and their cores are separated from each…

Read More

Ambitious new dark matter-hunting experiment delivers 1st results

NeRD

A new experiment designed to search the cosmos for its most mysterious “stuff,” dark matter, has delivered its first results.  While the Broadband Reflector Experiment for Axion Detection (BREAD) developed by the University of Chicago and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermilab hasn’t turned up dark matter particles just yet, the new results place a tighter constraint on the type of characteristics scientists can expect such particles to have. The BREAD experiment itself also served up an exciting new recipe that could be used in the hunt for dark matter…

Read More

NASA’s Tiny BurstCube Mission Launches to Study Cosmic Blasts

NeRD

4 min read NASA’s Tiny BurstCube Mission Launches to Study Cosmic Blasts BurstCube, shown in this artist’s concept, will orbit Earth as it hunts for short gamma-ray bursts. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab NASA’s BurstCube, a shoebox-sized satellite designed to study the universe’s most powerful explosions, is on its way to the International Space Station. The spacecraft travels aboard SpaceX’s 30th Commercial Resupply Services mission, which lifted off at 4:55 p.m. EDT on Thursday, March 21, from Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in…

Read More

Hubble Views a Galaxy Under Pressure

NeRD

2 min read Hubble Views a Galaxy Under Pressure This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows dwarf galaxy, LEDA 42160. ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Sun This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows LEDA 42160, a galaxy about 52 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. The dwarf galaxy is one of many forcing its way through the comparatively dense gas in the massive Virgo cluster of galaxies. The pressure exerted by this intergalactic gas, known as ram pressure, has dramatic effects on star formation in LEDA 42160. The gas…

Read More

Scientists may have just caught 7 exotic ‘ghost particles’ as they pierced through Earth

NeRD

Astronomers using the IceCube observatory, which is buried deep within the ice of the south pole, have detected seven elusive and exotic “ghost particle” candidates as they streamed through Earth. The signals suggest these particles are astrophysical tau neutrinos; they act as important messengers between powerful, high-energy celestial events and us. Neutrinos are charge-less and nearly mass-less particles that blast through the cosmos at speeds approaching that of light. Oddly enough, because of those parameters, neutrinos barely interact with anything. In fact, around 100 trillion of them pass through our bodies…

Read More

Peering Into the Tendrils of NGC 604 with NASA’s Webb

NeRD

4 Min Read Peering Into the Tendrils of NGC 604 with NASA’s Webb Star-forming region NGC 604. Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI The formation of stars and the chaotic environments they inhabit is one of the most well-studied, but also mystery-shrouded, areas of cosmic investigation. The intricacies of these processes are now being unveiled like never before by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Two new images from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) showcase star-forming region NGC 604, located in the Triangulum galaxy (M33), 2.73 million light-years away…

Read More

Stellar Beads on a String

NeRD

Galaxy cluster SDSS J1531+3414 X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/O. Omoruyi et al.; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI/G. Tremblay et al.; Radio: ASTRON/LOFAR; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk Astronomers have discovered one of the most powerful eruptions from a black hole ever recorded in the system known as SDSS J1531+3414 (SDSS J1531 for short). As explained in our press release, this mega-explosion billions of years ago may help explain the formation of a striking pattern of star clusters around two massive galaxies, resembling “beads on a string.” SDSS J1531 is a massive galaxy cluster containing hundreds of individual galaxies and huge reservoirs of hot gas and dark…

Read More

South Pole Telescope has a ‘treasure map’ to the secrets of dark matter

NeRD

Ancient cosmic light that has uniformly filled the universe since around 400,000 years after the Big Bang could act like a treasure map that guides scientists to the secrets of dark matter. The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) refers to the first light to freely travel across the universe. Its journey began after space had expanded and cooled enough to allow electrons and protons to form the first atoms, meaning electrons were no longer endlessly scattering photons, and the universe instantly went from being opaque to being transparent. The CMB, or…

Read More