Gamma-ray observations of a supernova remnant interacting with a molecular cloud in the outskirts of our Galaxy highlights the interplay of particle physics and particle astrophysics. Supernova Remnant Simeis 147 In the cosmos we see many examples of particle physics at work on scales that cannot be achieved in manmade, Earth-bound laboratories. One such [continue reading]
Stars live for a long time, with even the most massive stars having lifetimes measured in millions of years. But, for a mere few thousand years towards the end of their lives, some massive stars go through what astronomers call the yellow supergiant phase. This is remarkably short in astronomical terms, and, as a result, [continue reading]
A University of Oklahoma assistant professor and colleagues have identified two white dwarf stars considered the oldest and closest known. Astronomers identified these 11- to 12-billion-year-old white dwarf stars only 100 light years away from Earth. These stars are the closest known examples of the oldest stars in the Universe forming soon after the Big [continue reading]
ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory has studied the dusty belt around the nearby star Fomalhaut. The dust appears to be coming from collisions that destroy up to thousands of icy comets every day. Herschel Fomalhaut Fomalhaut is a young star, just a few hundred million years old, and twice as massive as the Sun. Its dust [continue reading]
An international team of researchers led by Masamune Oguri at Kavli IPMU and Naohisa Inada at Nara National College of Technology conduced an unprecedented survey of gravitationally lensed quasars, and used it to measure the expansion history of the universe. The result provides strong evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. There were [continue reading]
Dark matter must collide with human tissue, and physicists have now calculated how often. The answer? More often than you might expect. Dark matter plays a central role in the modeling of structure formation and galaxy evolution. Credit: NASA ESA One of the great challenges in cosmology is understanding the nature of the universe’s so-called [continue reading]