Space News & Blog Articles

There is a limit to how big we can build particle colliders on Earth, whether that is because of limited space or limited economics. Since size is equivalent to energy output for particle colliders, that also means there’s a limit to how energetic we can make them. And again, since high energies are required to test theories that go Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) of particle physics, that means we will be limited in our ability to validate those theories until we build a collider big enough. But a team of scientists led by Yang Bai at the University of Wisconsin thinks they might have a better idea - use already existing neutrino detectors as a large scale particle collider that can reach energies way beyond what the LHC is capable of.

Now that we have tools to find vast numbers of voids in the universe, we can finally ask…well, if we crack em open, what do we find inside?

When the Sun reaches the end of its main sequence, approximately 5 billion years from now, it will enter what is known as its Red Giant Branch (RGB) phase, during which it will expand and potentially consume Mercury, Venus, and possibly Earth. Not long after, it will undergo gravitational collapse and blow off its outer layers, leaving behind a dense remnant known as a white dwarf. While this is how planet Earth will eventually meet its end, it will not mark the end of the Solar System, as the white dwarf remnant of our Sun surrounded by clouds of trace elements.

Meteorites are both the messengers and time capsules of the Solar System. As pieces of larger asteroids that broke apart, or debris thrown up by impacts on other bodies, these "space rocks" retain the composition of where they originated from. As a result, scientists can study other planets, moons, and objects by examining the abundance of chemical elements in meteorites. Unfortunately, such studies are limited when it comes to meteorites retrieved on Earth, due to erosion, atmospheric filtration, and geological processes (like volcanism and mantle convection).

To answer that question of what’s inside a void, we have to first decide what a void…is. I know it’s easy enough to describe in big, broad, vague terms. Voids are the empty places. Voids are the things that aren’t. If you zoom out to truly enormous scales, well beyond the sizes of mere galaxies, where you take such a huge portrait of the universe that individual galaxies appear as nothing more than tiny points of light, then a) welcome to cosmology, and b) holy crap the voids really stand out. In fact, we got our first taste of voids all the way back in the late 1970’s, right when we started to build our first deep surveys of the universe. Once we started making maps, we noticed places where the maps were empty. And two different groups found the voids around the same time, although only one group called them voids. The other group called them “big holes” for one I’m glad they didn’t win that particular jargon war.

When you open your fridge, you expect it to be cooler than your kitchen. Similarly, when astronomers look back billions of years into the universe's history, they expect to find it was hotter than today. A team of Japanese researchers has just confirmed this prediction with remarkable precision, offering one of the strongest tests yet of our understanding of how the universe evolved.

Comet 3I/ATLAS, only the third known visitor from beyond our Solar System, has been brightening far more rapidly than expected as it approaches perihelion, its closest point to the Sun. From Earth, the comet has been positioned almost directly behind the Sun for the past month, making ground based observations nearly impossible during this crucial period. Instead, the team of astronomers have been watching from space based observatories.

Space clouds, or nebulae as they are more properly known are vast nurseries where stars are born from swirling collections of gas and dust scattered throughout a galaxy. These aren't fluffy white clouds like the ones we see in the sky, they're enormous regions stretching light years across, filled with hydrogen, helium, and trace amounts of heavier elements left over from previous generations of stars. Some glow brilliantly with vibrant colours as nearby stars illuminate them, while others appear as dark silhouettes blocking the light of stars behind them. Inside these clouds, gravity slowly pulls matter together over millions of years, creating dense pockets that eventually collapse to form new stars and planetary systems.