Space News & Blog Articles

Dark matter is hidden from our view making it difficult to study. Despite making up roughly 80 percent of all matter, we can't see it, touch it, or directly detect it with any of our instruments. It doesn't emit, absorb, or reflect light, making it completely invisible, and we only know it exists because of its gravitational effects on visible matter. The idea was first proposed by Fritz Zwicky in 1933 whilst studying the Coma Cluster. He noticed that the galaxies in this group were moving far too quickly to be held together by gravity alone.

Gamma ray bursts are the most luminous explosions in the universe, briefly outshining entire galaxies in a violent flash of high energy radiation. These - excuse the pun - astronomical detonations release more energy in a few seconds than our Sun will produce over its entire ten billion year lifetime, sending jets of gamma rays racing through space. Despite their incredible brightness, gamma ray bursts are fleeting events, lasting anywhere from milliseconds to several minutes before fading away.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has a data scale problem. There are just too many places to look for an interstellar signal, and even if you’re looking in the right place you could be looking at the wrong frequency or at the wrong time. Several strategies have come up to deal narrow the search given this overabundance of data, and a new paper pre-print in arXiv from Naoki Seto of the Kyoto University falls nicely into that category - by using the Brightest Of All TIme (BOAT) Gamma Ray Burst, with some help from our own galaxy.

Planetary formation has, by and large, been well understood and it involves flat discs of dust and gas slowly coalescing into new alien worlds. New research has just been published which seems to give that familiar process a bit of a twist. The international team of researchers behind the study and led by Dr Andrew Winter from Queen Mary University of London, have discovered compelling evidence that many protoplanetary discs are in fact subtly warped.

Einstein Crosses are the effect of the universe’s natural telescopes. They occur when light from a distant galaxy passes by a massive foreground object, like a cluster of galaxies, that bends the very fabric of space. The gravity from these intervening objects acts like a gargantuan lens, warping the path that light follows and creating multiple images of the background source. Despite the name, Einstein didn’t specifically predict a cross, instead he proposed the concept known as gravitational lensing. His concept was published in his theory of General Relativity in 1915 but was later confirmed during the solar eclipse of 1919.

For decades, scientists engaged in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) have probed the galaxy for signs of artificial radio transmissions. Beginning with Project Ozma in 1960, astronomers have used radio antennas to listen for possible transmissions from other star systems or galaxies. These efforts culminated in January 2016 with the launch of Breakthrough Listen, the most comprehensive SETI effort to date. This project combines radio wave observations from the Green Bank and Parkes Observatory, as well as visible light observations from the Automated Planet Finder (APF),