Almost 14 billion years ago, the Universe we inhabit burst into existence in an extraordinary event that initiated the Big Bang. In the first fleeting fraction of a second, the Universe expanded exponentially, stretching far beyond the view of our best telescopes. All this, of course, was just theory. Image Credit: NASA Researchers from [continue reading]
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]
Computer simulations of galaxies growing over billions of years have revealed a likely scenario for how they feed: a cosmic version of swirly straws. Created with the help of supercomputers, this still from a simulation shows the formation of a massive galaxy during the first 2 billion years of the Universe. Hydrogen gas is [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]
The rare Green Pea galaxies discovered by the general public in 2007 could help confirm astronomers’ understanding of reionization, a pivotal stage in the evolution of the early Universe, say University of Michigan researchers. A montage of the six Green Pea galaxies that University of Michigan astronomy researchers studied. Image Credit: Anne Jaskot Reionization [continue reading]