Category Astronomy/Space

A special type of aurora, draped east-west across the night sky like a glowing pearl necklace, is helping scientists better understand the science of auroras and their powerful drivers out in space. Known as auroral beads, these lights often show up just before large auroral displays, which are caused by electrical storms in space called substorms...

The question of how small, dwarf galaxies have sustained the formation of new stars over the course of the Universe has long confounded the world’s astronomers. An international research team led by Lund University in Sweden has found that dormant small galaxies can slowly accumulate gas over many billions of years. When this gas suddenly collapses under its own weight, new stars are able to arise.

There are around 2,000 billion galaxies in our Universe and, while our own Milky-Way encompasses between 200 and 400 billion stars, small dwarf galaxies contain only a thousand times less. How stars are formed in these tiny galaxies has long been shrouded in mystery.

However, in a new study published in the research journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a resea...

Galaxy is distorted, appearing as a ring of light in the sky...

The end of the universe as we know it will not come with a bang. Most stars will very, very slowly fizzle as their temperatures fade to zero.

“It will be a bit of a sad, lonely, cold place,” said theoretical physicist Matt Caplan, who added no one will be around to witness this long farewell happening in the far far future. Most believe all will be dark as the universe comes to an end. “It’s known as ‘heat death,’ where the universe will be mostly black holes and burned-out stars,” said Caplan, who imagined a slightly different picture when he calculated how some of these dead stars might change over the eons.

Punctuating the darkness...