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Category: cosmology – Page 391

This animation gives a sense of the awe-inspiring scale of some of the known objects in our universe. It is difficult for human minds to comprehend the sheer size of distant stars, many of which completely dwarf our own Sun. Here we see some of the most famous objects displayed relative to one another. The animation begins with Earth, which has a radius of about 6.3 million metres, and ends at VY Canis Majoris, one of the largest known stars in existence, with a radius about 1420 times that of our own Sun, or 990 billion metres! Keep an eye on the changing scale underneath the objects to really appreciate the variation in size.

This animation will form part of the “The Living Universe” exhibition, to be displayed at the ESO Supernova, opening in spring 2018.

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This graphic is perhaps more complex than first meets the eye. The Sun glows hot to the left, illuminating the Earth’s surface. The side facing away from the Sun is cast in deep shadow, and the man-made lights of cities are visible. The darkest patch of shadow, where the Earth blocks all the Sun’s light, is called the umbra. The lighter slivers of shadow either side of the umbra, which are not in total darkness, is the penumbra. Needless to say, this is not to scale!

This graphic will form part of the “The Living Universe” exhibition, to be displayed at the ESO Supernova, opening in spring 2018.

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April 2 (UPI) — Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have observed the most distant star yet discovered.

Astronomers were trying to watch a gravitationally lensed supernova called Refsdal in the distant universe when they noticed an unexpected point source. The source turned out to be the universe’s most distant star. Astronomers dubbed it Lensed Star 1.

The star is located 8.3 billion light-years away in the same galaxy as the Refsdal supernova. The light imaged by Hubble showcases the star as it existed just 4.4 billion years after the Big Bang and the birth of the universe.

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Stupefied astronomers on Wednesday unveiled the first and only known galaxy without dark matter, the invisible and poorly-understood substance thought to make up a quarter of the Universe.

The discovery could revise or even upend theories of how galaxies are formed, they reported in the journal Nature.

“This is really bizarre,” said co-author Roberto Abraham, an astronomer at the University of Toronto.

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Millions of light-years from Earth, there’s a galaxy that is completely devoid of dark matter — the mysterious, unseen material that is thought to permeate the Universe. Instead, the galaxy seems to be made up of just regular ol’ matter, the kind that comprises stars, planets, and dust. That makes this galaxy a rare find, and its discovery opens up new possibilities for how dark matter is distributed throughout the cosmos.

No one knows what dark matter is. True to its name, the material doesn’t emit light, so we’ve never detected it directly. All scientists know is that it’s out there based on their observations of how galaxies and stars move. Some unseen substance is affecting these deep-space objects, filling up the space between stars and clusters of galaxies. And there seems to be a lot of it. Dark matter is thought to make up 27 percent of all the mass and energy of the Universe. The matter we can see — the atoms that make up you and me — accounts for just 5 percent.

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