Images made by taking very deep exposures, then subtracting away all known light sources appear to show the light from the very first stars in the universe. Still up for debate but moving through the peer review system
VY Canis Majoris is a red hyper-giant. This is the largest known star. If it were possible for a human to walk on the surface of Canis Majoris, at 3 miles an hour for 8 hours a day, it would take him or her 162,000 years to walk the entire circumference (compared with 2 years 11 months to complete the same task on the Earth).
Astronomer Phil Plait talks about a new discovery that might be able to describe the Universe that existed before the Big Bang.
Early humans successfully fended off a virus that infected chimpanzees by evolving a protein capable of neutralizing it, according to a new study. But what goes around comes around, evolutionarily speaking: Four million years later, the same protein seems to have left us more vulnerable than other primates to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
06.13Water found on Mars
Water (or perhaps clear ice) found on Mars (with picture). A new analysis of pictures taken by the exploration rover Opportunity reveals what appear to be small ponds of liquid water on the surface of Mars.
Alien worlds, once hidden from knowledge, are now being discovered in droves, stunning astronomers with their unique features and sheer numbers. The discoveries are so common that more and more don’t even get reported outside scientific circles.
The tentative detection of low frequency radio waves on Saturn’s icy moon, Titan, could signal an underground ocean of liquid water, a new study says. If so, it would be good news for the possibility of life beneath the surface of this bizarre world.
Global warming, the Iraq war, economic woes, fears of terrorism and now, just when it appeared things couldn’t get any worse, astronomers predict the Sun and Earth along with it will be hurled into deep space when our galaxy collides with a neighboring galaxy.
Astronomers propose an enormous liquid-mirror telescope on the moon that could be hundreds of times more sensitive than the Hubble Space Telescope.
05.17Dark Matter Revealed
“Last summer, astronomers used a really clever observing strategy to present the best evidence to date that dark matter, once dismissed as a hare-brained idea, really does make up most of the mass of the universe. The image above does it again, in a slightly different way.”