Cosmology

 

Half the matter in the universe was missing – we found it hiding in the cosmos

Cosmologists had only been able to find half the matter that should exist in the universe. With the discovery of a new astronomical phenomenon and new telescopes, researchers just found the rest.

Source: theconversation.com/half-the-matter-in-the-universe-was-missing-we-found-it-hiding-in-the-cosmos-138569

 

“We Exist Within a Colossal Sphere” –The Void that Harbors the Milky Way (Weekend Feature) | The Daily Galaxy

    Our Milky Way Galaxy exists in void –one of the vast holes of the “Swiss-cheese” structure of the cosmos– with a radius measuring roughly 2 billion light years in diameter –the largest void known to science, shaped like a sphere with a shell of increasing thickness made up of galaxies, stars and other …

Source: www.google.com/amp/s/dailygalaxy.com/2020/04/we-exist-within-a-colossal-sphere-the-void-that-harbors-the-milky-way-weekend-feature/amp/

A long-lost type of dark matter may resolve the biggest disagreement in physics | Live Science

 

Double-Peak and Destroy: Accretion in a Tidal Disruption Event Reveals Itself

Astrobites reports on the first confident detection of an accretion disk that formed after a supermassive black hole tore apart a hapless star.

Source: aasnova.org/2020/04/28/double-peak-and-destroy-accretion-in-a-tidal-disruption-event-reveals-itself

The Universe may not look the same in all directions after all – Astronomy Now

One of the core assumptions all professional and amateur astronomers learn when first entering the field is that at large scales, the universe appears the same in all directions, that is, it’s isotropic.

A paper accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics suggests that may not be the case.

An international team of researchers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton and other data archives studied the X-ray luminosity of 842 galaxy clusters.

Source: astronomynow.com/2020/04/13/the-universe-may-not-look-the-same-in-all-directions-after-all/

Mysterious radio bursts from a nearby spiral galaxy

Fast radio flashes still pose something of an enigma to astronomers. Although they only emit for milliseconds at a time, hundreds have been observed in the sky. Only four such Fast Radio Bursts (FRB) have been precisely located so far. Now astronomer have traced the source of a newly discovered FRB to a nearby spiral galaxy similar to our own Milky Way, a galaxy half a billion light-years from Earth, making it the closest FRB to Earth ever localized. The burst called FRB 180916.J0158+65 was observed by a group of eight radio telescopes, including the 100-meter Effelsberg telescope.

Source: www.mpg.de/14335120/a-repeating-fast-radio-burst-from-a-spiral-galaxy

A Crisis in Cosmology – W. M. Keck Observatory

Maunakea, Hawaii – A group of astronomers led by University of California, Davis has obtained new data that suggest the universe is expanding more rapidly than previously thought.

The study comes on the heels of a hot debate over just how fast the universe is ballooning; measurements thus far are in disagreement.

The team’s new measurement of the Hubble Constant, or the expansion rate of the universe, involved a different method. They used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in combination with W. M. Keck Observatory’s Adaptive Optics (AO) system to observe three gravitationally-lensed systems. This is the first time ground-based AO technology has been used to obtain the Hubble Constant

Source: keckobservatory.org/hubble-constant/

 

Astronomers just quintupled the number of known repeating fast radio bursts

A Canadian telescope spotted eight more repeating fast radio bursts. What causes these cryptic flashes of radio waves from deep space remains unclear.

Source: www.sciencenews.org/article/astronomers-just-quintupled-number-known-repeating-fast-radio-bursts?tgt=nr

The first AI capable of simulating the universe works so well it’s scary

A team of researchers recently pioneered the world’s first AI universe simulator. It’s fast; it’s accurate; and its creators are baffled by its ability to understand things about the cosmos that it shouldn’t. Scientists have used computer simulations to try and digitally reverse-engineer the origin and evolution of our universe for decades. The best traditional …

Source: thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2019/06/26/the-first-ai-capable-of-simulating-the-universe-works-so-well-its-scary/