Tag: The Universe

After its “birth” in the Big Bang, the universe consisted mainly of hydrogen and a few helium atoms. These are the lightest elements in the periodic table. More-or-less all elements heavier than helium were produced in the 13.8 billion years between the Big Bang and the present day. Stars have produced many of these heavier elements through the process of nuclear fusion. However, this only makes elements as heavy as iron. The creation of any heavier elements would consume energy instead of releasing it. In order to explain the presence…

The universe is undeniably vast, and from our perspective, it may seem like Earth is in the middle of everything. But is there a center of the cosmos, and if so, where is it? If the Big Bang started the universe, then where did it all come from, and where is it going? To start tackling these questions, let’s go back about 100 years. In the 1920s, astronomer Edwin Hubble made two amazing back-to-back discoveries: Early in the decade, he found that “island universes,” now known as galaxies, sit very…

For the first time, scientists have revealed crucial properties of the mysterious, radioactive substance promethium — nearly eight decades after the elusive rare earth element was discovered. Promethium is one of the 15 lanthanide elements at the bottom of the periodic table. Also known as the rare earths, these metals exhibit a number of useful properties, including strong magnetism and unusual optical characteristics, making them particularly important in modern electronic devices.  “They are used in lasers; they are part of the screens of your smartphone. They are also used in…

A rocket launch. Our nearest stellar neighbor. A Netflix show. All of these things have something in common: They must contend with the “three-body problem.” But exactly what is this thorny physics conundrum? The three-body problem describes a system containing three bodies that exert gravitational forces on one another. While it may sound simple, it’s a notoriously tricky problem and “the first real worry of Newton,” Billy Quarles, a planetary dynamicist at Valdosta State University in Georgia, told LiveScience. In a system of only two bodies, like a planet and…

Strange behavior in a massive cluster of merging galaxies could be explained if dark matter, the universe’s most mysterious stuff, can collide with itself. However, the most favored model of cosmology right now is the cold dark matter (CDM) model — and it suggests that dark matter, which is effectively invisible because it doesn’t interact with light, is not self-interacting. To get to the bottom of this conundrum, researchers from the Astrophysics and Cosmology group of Italy’s Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA) set about simulating what is happening within…

Construction of the Extremely Large Telescope has reached another milestone, with the completion of the dome’s steel skeleton.  The European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) — the world’s largest visible- and infrared-light telescope — is under development on the Cerro Armazones mountain in Chile’s Atacama Desert and is expected to see its “first light” by 2028.  ESO recently shared a stunning new nighttime photo taken from inside of the dome on April 3. The photo captures the telescope’s progress with the Milky Way‘s heart overhead and the rest…

Astronomy has a bright future.  The universe is being revealed in exquisite detail with the current generation of large optical telescopes, reaching back close to the big bang. There’s hope that the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy will be solved. Thousands of exoplanets have been discovered, and astronomers may be closing in on the first detection of life beyond Earth. However, observations into the cosmic frontier involve extremely faint targets and astronomers are always hungry for more light. In order to keep peering farther into unknown reaches of…