Category Astronomy/Space

As the universe evolves, scientists expect large cosmic structures to grow at a certain rate: dense regions such as galaxy clusters would grow denser, while the void of space would grow emptier.

But University of Michigan researchers have discovered that the rate at which these large structures grow is slower than predicted by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity.

They also showed that as dark energy accelerates the universe’s global expansion, the suppression of the cosmic structure growth that the researchers see in their data is even more prominent than what the theory pr...

Research at Hokkaido University has revealed that elusive particles called neutrinos can interact with photons, the fundamental particles of light and other electromagnetic radiation, in ways not previously detected. The findings from Kenzo Ishikawa, Professor Emeritus at Hokkaido University, with colleague Yutaka Tobita, lecturer at Hokkaido University of Science, were published in the journal Physics Open.

“Our results are important for understanding the quantum mechanical interactions of some of the most fundamental particles of matter,” says Ishikawa. “They may also help reveal details of currently poorly understood phenomena in the sun and other stars.”

Neutrinos are one of the most mysterious fundamental...

Astronomers have discovered the first “bubble of galaxies,” an almost unimaginably huge cosmic structure thought to be a fossilized remnant from just after the Big Bang sitting in our galactic backyard.

The bubble spans a billion light years, making it 10,000 times wider than the Milky Way galaxy.

Yet this giant bubble, which cannot be seen by the naked eye, is a relatively close 820 million light years away from our home galaxy, in what astronomers call the nearby universe.

The bubble can be thought of as “a spherical shell with a heart,” Daniel Pomarede, an astrophysicist at France’s Atomic Energy Commission, told AFP.

Inside that heart is the Bootes supercluster of gala...

Black holes are one of the most mysterious and fascinating phenomena in the Universe. A paper published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society hints at the existence of several black holes in the Hyades cluster – the closest open cluster to our solar system – which would make them the closest black holes to Earth ever detected...