Acquired by ESA’s Planck space telescope, the most detailed map ever created of the cosmic microwave background – the relic radiation from the Big Bang – was released today revealing the existence of features that challenge the foundations of our current understanding of the Universe. The anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) as [continue reading]
Peering deep into the vast stellar halo that envelops our Milky Way galaxy, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered tantalizing evidence for the possible existence of a shell of stars that are a relic of cannibalism by our Milky Way. This illustration shows the disk of our Milky Way galaxy surrounded [continue reading]
Using modified laws of gravity, researchers from Case Western Reserve University and Weizmann Institute of Science closely predicted a key property measured in faint dwarf galaxies that are satellites of the nearby giant spiral galaxy Andromeda. The Andromeda Galaxy, our large neighbour galaxy. Image Credit & Copyright: Dieter Beer (http://www.starhopper.at) & Patrick Hochleitner (http://www.photonhunter.at) The [continue reading]
Astronomers of the international CLUES collaboration have identified “Cosmic Web Stripping” as a new way of explaining the famous missing dwarf problem: the lack of observed dwarf galaxies compared with that predicted by the theory of Cold Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Cosmic Web Stripping, Visualization. Image Credit: Alejandro Benitez Llambay High-precision observations over [continue reading]
The Universe abounds with dark matter. Nobody knows what it consists of. Physicists from the University of Oslo have now launched a very hard mathematical explanation that could solve the mystery once and for all. SIGNS OF DARK MATTER: The image shows all the gamma rays recorded by the Fermi-LAT space probe as a map [continue reading]
KIPAC scientists use X-ray observations show how galaxies shape their environment, and vice-versa A major component of our understanding of galaxy evolution that has remained elusive is the influence of the local environment on the galaxy, especially when discussing galaxies in large clusters. Galaxy clusters, the largest gravitationally bound objects in the Universe, [continue reading]