University of Texas at Austin astronomer Steven Finkelstein has led a team that has discovered and measured the distance to the most distant galaxy ever found. The galaxy is seen as it was at a time just 700 million years after the Big Bang. An artist’s rendition of the newly discovered most distant galaxy [continue reading]
Cosmologist Christof Wetterich of the University of Heidelberg has uploaded a paper to the arXiv server in which he claims it’s possible that the theory of the expansion of the Universe might be incorrect. He suggests instead that the redshift observed by researchers here on Earth might be caused by an increase in the [continue reading]
ESA’s Herschel space observatory has discovered an extremely distant galaxy making stars more than 2000 times faster than our own Milky Way. Seen at a time when the Universe was less than a billion years old, its mere existence challenges our theories of galaxy evolution. Artist’s impression of starburst galaxy HFLS3. The galaxy appears [continue reading]
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]
By combining the power of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer Space Telescope, and one of nature’s own natural “zoom lenses” in space, astronomers have set a new distance record for finding the farthest galaxy yet seen in the Universe. In this image, astronomers use NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and a cosmic zoom lens to [continue reading]
BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, is mapping a huge volume of space to measure the role of dark energy in the evolution of the Universe. BOSS is the largest program of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) and has just announced the first major result of a new mapping technique, based on [continue reading]