A team of astronomers led by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to discover seven of the most primitive and distant galaxies ever seen. This timeline shows the evolution of the Universe since the Big Bang. The new observations, labeled “Hubble 2012,” explored the deepest reaches of the [continue reading]
Nature hath no fury like a dying star – and astronomers couldn’t be happier… An international research team, led by Edo Berger of Harvard University, made the most of a dying star’s fury to probe a distant galaxy some 9.5 billion light-years distant. The dying star, which lit the galactic scene, is the [continue reading]
For over a decade astronomers have been probing a region of the northern sky, not far from the handle of the Big Dipper, that is relatively free of bright stars and the diffuse glow of the Milky Way. The scientists want to take advantage of the clarity of the sky there to peer beyond [continue reading]
The universe was born about 13.7 billion years ago in the Big Bang. The Sun and its system of planets formed about five billion years ago. What happened, then, during that long, intervening stretch of nearly nine billion years? This is one of the key questions in modern science. Now you don’t see it; [continue reading]
Treasure trove of new infrared data made available to astronomers Click to Enlarge ESO’s VISTA telescope has created the widest deep view of the sky ever made using infrared light. This new picture of an unremarkable patch of sky comes from the UltraVISTA survey and reveals more than 200 000 galaxies. It forms just one [continue reading]