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Astronomers say they have solved an outstanding problem that challenged our understanding of how the Universe evolved – the spatial distribution of faint satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way.

The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains our Solar System, and is named for its appearance from Earth. It is a barred spiral galaxy that contains an estimated 100–400 billion stars and has a diameter between 150,000 and 200,000 light-years.

University of rochester / michael osadciw.

That’s because a team of scientists from the University of Rochester published, what they call, a “wildly theoretical paper” outlining how we could one day use asteroids as massive city-sized space habitats.

JWST is the most powerful space telescope ever flown. Here’s how researched created the gigantic scope’s first products.

Theoretical physicists from Warsaw and Oxford universities argue that a superluminal world possessing three temporal dimensions and one dimension in space could potentially change our concept of time, according to a new paper.

The researchers involved say they have developed “an extension of special relativity” that incorporates three individual time dimensions with a single space dimension, which helps explain how observations made by “superluminal” observers—inertial observers moving faster than the speed of light—might appear.

Within such a framework, the researchers argue that spontaneous events that can occur in the absence of a deterministic cause and other strange phenomena would be experienced by observers moving faster than the speed of light within a vacuum, concepts that potentially transform our concept of time as we know it.

Images from NASA’s impressive James Webb Space Telescope are changing the way we see the universe — and this is just year one.

It’s a year since the James Webb telescope launched, and we’ve marvelled at its pictures ever since.

Studying the large-scale structure of our galaxy isn’t easy. We don’t have a clear view of the Milky Way’s shape and features like we do of other galaxies, largely because we live within it. But we do have some advantages. From within, we’re able to carry out close-up surveys of the Milky Way’s stellar population and its chemical compositions. That gives researchers the tools they need to compare our own galaxy to the many millions of others in the Universe.

This week, an international team of researchers from the USA, UK, and Chile released a paper that does just that. They dug through a catalogue of ten thousand galaxies produced by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, searching for galaxies with similar attributes to our own.

They discovered that the Milky Way has twins – many of them – but just as many that are only superficially similar, with fundamental differences buried in the data. What they discovered has implications for the future evolution of our own galaxy.

In the 1995 post-apocalyptic action film “Waterworld” Earth’s polar ice caps have completely melted, and the sea level has risen to over 5 miles, covering nearly all of the land. Astronomers have uncovered a pair of planets that are true “water worlds,” unlike any planet found in our solar system.

Slightly larger than Earth, they don’t have the density of rock. And yet, they are denser than the gas-giant outer planets orbiting our Sun. So, what are they made of? The best answer is that these exoplanets have global oceans at least 500 times deeper than the average depth of Earth’s oceans, which simply are a wet veneer on a rocky ball.

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