So far no one has found evidence of intelligent aliens elsewhere in the cosmos. But if they do exist, they might be hanging out on Dyson spheres circling the husks of sunlike stars called white dwarfs scattered throughout the Milky Way, a new paper argues. And that’s there we should be focusing our search for … Read more
Dark matter, the elusive substance that accounts for the majority of the mass in the universe, may be made up of massive particles called gravitons that first popped into existence in the first moment after the Big Bang. And these hypothetical particles might be cosmic refugees from extra dimensions, a new theory suggests. The researchers’ … Read more
Scientists have crafted a new message for any intelligent extraterrestrials who might be out there. And they want feedback on whether they should send it. The technology needed to send the message is not yet ready. And if and when the note is transmitted, it would take thousands of years for it to reach its … Read more
A possible galaxy that exists some 13.5 billion light-years from Earth has broken the record for farthest astronomical object ever seen. That age places this collection of stars, now dubbed HD1, between a time of total darkness — about 14 billion years ago the universe was a blank slate devoid of any stars or galaxies … Read more
Two of the strangest, most colossal structures in the Milky Way may have formed in a 100,000-year-long explosion at our galaxy’s center, new research suggests. Those structures — named the Fermi bubbles and eROSITA bubbles after the respective telescopes that discovered them — straddle the Milky Way’s center in an enormous hourglass shape, with one … Read more
The Goldilocks zone gets its name from the fairy tale, “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”. Goldilocks is a fussy little girl whose porridge has to be just right — neither too hot nor too cold. It’s the same with life itself — or at least, the kind of water-based life we’re familiar with on Earth. … Read more
Astronomers searching for our solar system’s elusive Planet Nine — a theoretical world that may lurk deep in a cloud of icy rocks far beyond the orbit of Neptune — have come up short once again. In a recent paper published Dec. 23, 2021 in The Astrophysical Journal, researchers pored over six years of telescope … Read more
Large galaxies may steal dark matter from smaller galaxies they nearly collide with, new research suggests. Scientists from the University of California, Irvine and Pomona College used computer models to simulate the evolution of a corner of the universe about 60 million light-years across. The new computer models, which weren’t designed to do so, created … Read more
Corkscrewing through the cosmos, three distant galaxies collide in a stunning new image captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. This cosmic crash is known as a triple galaxy merger, when three galaxies slowly draw each other nearer and tear each other apart with their competing gravitational forces. Mergers like these are common throughout the universe, … Read more
Astronomers have finally seen the remnants of a dead planet as it tumbled onto the surface of a dead star – and in doing so, they confirmed decades of speculation about what happens to solar systems that reach the end of their lives. These explosive observations — which were taken with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory … Read more
